About Responsive
Responsive is Boston University Interactive Design’s suite of theme frameworks and plugins – our product. When you build a website on Responsive, you have access to a number of features out of the box.
Check out the Responsive Framework demo
Supported Features
- Mobile-first, responsive design
- Easy to use interface for editing main navigation with BU Navigation
- Excellent training and documentation for first-time WordPress users on basic WordPress and BU WordPress to ensure site admins are prepared for editing and updating their site, which covers basics such as news, categories, page editing, and design options in Responsive
- Easily build landing pages for home and section pages using BU Landing Pages
- Manage profiles and display lists and groups of profiles (such as by department) using BU Profiles
- Add banners with text and multiple layout options using BU Banners
- Easy to edit, custom forms using Gravity Forms
- Add slideshows using BU Slideshow
- Easily add live course information from the BU course catalog with the BU Course Feeds plugin
- Add “collapsibles” – sections which expand and collapse to help condense pages with lots of information on them via the BU Front End Library plugin
- Automatically generate lists of child pages from any page on the site via the BU Front End Library plugin
- Add text in the sidebar to just a certain page or section using the BU Text Widget
- Add related links in the sidebar using the BU Links List widget
- News feeds anywhere in the site using BU List News
- Automatic integration with BU Calendar
- Control over meta tags for SEO and social media using BU Post Details
- Restrict visibility to sensitive pages or entire sites with BU Access Control
- Automatic integration with the BU Alert system
- Compliant with Accessibility Standards
- Advanced editing workflows for allowing site admins to grant edit access to specific sections, pages, or even content types to help make ongoing content maintenance easier
Lesser-known features
- BU Includes – allows the content of a page, post, text file or HTML file to be embedded on another page or post in WordPress.
- Random Image – displays a random image from a list of images.
- Redirects under a department url to any site using Safe Redirect Manager. For example, bu.edu/com/fancy can use Safe Redirect Manager. bu.edu/fancy can’t use Safe Redirect Manager, and requires a marketing URL.
- WP LaTeX – great if you suddenly need complex mathematical equations in your website.
Additionally, we have a Custom CSS plugin which allows us to style sites without creating a new theme, or grant clients the ability to style their own site. Custom CSS sites written by anyone outside of Interactive Design must go through a branding and accessibility review before launch, and these styles are not supported by IS&T or Interactive Design during Responsive updates, WordPress upgrades, or other long-term maintenance tasks.
FAQs
- Can we add this great WordPress plugin we found out in the world to our site?
- Everyone is welcome to bring plugins to the team for consideration in the future, but all plugins must be carefully reviewed for security, commitment to ongoing maintenance, compatibility, cost, and many other factors before being accepted into the BU WordPress environment. Do not count on the ability to use outside plugins in projects without consulting with ID & IS&T developers first, and allow ample time for competitive analysis and review if your website depends on building or installing a new plugin.
- Other common questions on TechWeb