Workaround for inserting special characters

I’ve just had a support call from one of our users trying to insert a special character (š) for use in a Czech name on a website.  But whenever he pressed the UPDATE button and previewed the content somehow it would be converted to the inverted question-mark character (¿).

Now, I know that we have got issues at St Andrews with a mismatch in character-sets between Site Manager (UTF-8) and our Oracle database (ISO-8859-1) which weren’t spotted when Site Manager was installed back in 2006, so it could have something to do with that, but I also wondered if it could have something to do with how HTMLArea handles such codes.

So I went to TOOLS > MODIFY PROFILE and changed the “Html Editor” from HTMLArea to Standard Textarea and lo and behold! when I inserted either code for š: š or & #353; and clicked on UPDATE the correct character was retained and showed correctly in Preview.

Like I said, this could simply be a local issue to St Andrews but if it’s not then I hope this helps other users. And if you have any great tips for inserting special characters please let us know.

We have scheduled work on our database later this year which should address our character set mismatch issue.

Gareth @ St Andrews

Approval top-tip

As an Administrator (although the same could be said for Moderators and Power Users too) I find it a little frustrating sometimes if I’m needing to quickly approve a piece of content to go to the Approve documents screen only to be faced with a long list of content items and sections.

Approve documents - Administrator view

The issue is that the section column shows only the start and end points of the path, e.g. Home > … > Dean’s Office, and quite often I want to quickly see all the pieces of content that need to be approved for a particular section, or sub-site.

Admittedly, if I’ve just made the update then that piece of content will usually be sitting at the top of the list, but if I’ve been working on a number of pages over the last couple of hours or even days then they can be randomly scattered throughout the list.

You can find out the sections, but it’s a little cumbersome requiring you to hover your mouse over the sections so that the full path appears in a tooltip.

Web Developer add-on for Firefox required

However, I’ve discovered a little trick that I’ve found really helpful.

This tip assumes that you’re using Mozilla Firefox to access TERMINALFOUR Site Manager and have Chris Pendereck’s excellent Web Developer add-on for Firefox installed.

Step 1: Display title attributes

Logged into Site Manager, and with the Approve documents screen showing, on the Web Developer toolbar click on Information > Display Title Attributes, since the tooltips are the created by title attributes on the div element wrapping the path.

Click on Information > Display Title Attributes

This now shows above each abbreviated path detail the full path in a yellow box:

Title attributes (and full paths) are now shown in yellow

Step 2: Firefox search

The next step is to pull up your Firefox search (Ctrl+F on a PC, Cmd+F on a Mac) and enter the name of the section you’re looking for (e.g. News) into the search box.

Then click on the “Highlight all” button on the find bar.  This will highlight all instances of that keyword in purple, which now makes it much easier to scan through the list to identify the pieces of content you’re interested in.

Searching for "News" Highlight all shows all instances in purple.

I hope that helps you too.

Gareth @ St Andrews

LDAP users editing html elements 6.2.0020

This bug seems to affect 6.2 Revision 0020 versions of SiteManager.  T4 are aware of the bug and will be releasing a new build later in the month.

The problem is that when the LDAP import is run, the HTML Editor (WYSIWYG) for new Users is not being set correctly. The Users therefore cannot modify content with HTML elements. Any new users after an LDAP import will need to have their editor set.  T4 are doing a new build with this bug fix included.  The fix can be applied yourself everytime an LDAP import is done. You can do this by running a SQL query on your database, or by manually editing each user’s profile and selecting the editor (make sure to click update).

SQL can be used: update users set html_editor=4 where html_editor=0

Highlighting the current category in the Media Library

I’ve just made an update to my post about Tweaking the SiteManager UI in Firefox from January 2008.

Tweak not working

For months now — I guess since our update to version 6 point something — I noticed that my original Media Library tweak was no longer working, it wasn’t highlighting which category I was currently viewing. So I dusted down Firebug and did some investigating.

I guess the original tweaks worked in Site Manager version 5.x.

The fix

It looks like TERMINALFOUR changed the class applied to the currently selected Media Library category. The following should work in Stylish … at least, it works for me!

a.nodeSel {
background-color: #950004 !important;
color: #fff !important;
padding: 2px !important ;
}

Example

What it does, is gives the currently selected category a dark red background, and displays the text in white.  Like this:

If you’re not sure how to make this work then check out the original article: Tweaking the SiteManager UI in Firefox.

Gareth @ St Andrews

Problems downloading items from the Media Library in IE

We’ve had an issue for a wee while now whereby if you were using Internet Explorer then you couldn’t use the Download links in the Media Library to download a file.  With a little insight from TERMINALFOUR and a poke around in the configuration settings this issue has now been resolved.

The problem

What happened in IE was that if you clicked on the Download link (either when right-clicking a Media Library item or while modifying a Media Library item, see screenshot below) then a blank page would open.

Download link in Media Library

It worked as expected, however, in Firefox.

The solution

It turns out that the solution can be found within Site Manager handlers’ configuration (TOOLS > CONFIGURATION > Handlers tab).

Site Manager configuration

1. Go to TOOLS > CONFIGURATION.
2. Click on the HANDLERS tab.
3. Locate the Download Handler.
4. Click on Configure.
5. Make sure “Download Method” is set to Attachment.
6. Click UPDATE.

The problem was that our Download Method was set to “Inline”.

Download handler - set Download Method to Attachment

Interestingly, there’s a letter answered in this month’s .net magazine about a very similar issue involving the content-disposition HTTP header.

Converting designs into SiteManager Styles

Printing out a screenshot and scribbling on it

This morning my task is to convert a static HTML design for a new website so that it can be managed within TERMINALFOUR SiteManager. I may of course be stating the obvious to all readers, but this may help someone.

Header and footer

In creating a new SiteManager style you first need to decide how to break up the page into header and footer, so that the appropriate code can be dropped into those fields within the SiteManager Style dialog.  This depends on where the main content is going to be, with the code above it being the header, and the code below being the footer.

Links, menus, sections

With that decided you then need to work out where the various links, menus and sections on your design are coming from.  Are they going to be pulled in with a top content item from another section, for example, or from a related content sub-section; do the links need to be hard-coded (in the case of a link to a site managed in another SiteManager channel) or dynamically generated by SiteManager using a navigation object, etc.

Print it out

I’ve find the easiest way, by far, to plan the job is to take a screenshot of your design, print it out — we have a colour A3 printer here which is perfect for the task — and then get scribbling on the page.  I use coloured highlighter markers too to distinguish different kinds of treatment, e.g. blue for hard-coded links, green for new navigation objects, yellow for main content, etc.

I also make sure that I write on the print-out which unseen elements within the <head> section need to be updated/created, e.g. CSS styles, meta tags, RSS links, etc.

Build it

Once I’ve mapped out what I need to do it’s then just a case of starting somewhere and creating the new navigation objects as required.  I always start at top-left and work in a clockwise direction.  I also code it in my text editor of choice (Blumentals WeBuilder, thanks for asking) as I find it easier to manage code in that environment (and we also commit all our code to a Subversion repository) and then when finished cut and paste it into SiteManager.

I hope that’s of help to someone.

Gareth @ St Andrews

PureText deals with Mozilla problem pasting from Word

One issue we’ve encountered with copying and pasting from Microsoft Word into Mozilla Firefox 3 is that it brings with it a whole load of Word-specific code, e.g.:

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:PunctuationKerning/> ...

which can lead to unexpected results on the published page. Even using the “Remove all formatting” button doesn’t remove the unwanted Word-generated XML code.

PureText

However, I’ve discovered a small Windows application called PureText by Steve Miller that runs in the system tray/notification area that addresses this issue.

The application runs as a single executable file (i.e. you don’t need to install it) and when you’ve copied your text from Microsoft Word, rather than pasting it with the standard Ctrl+V instead you use Windows key+V.

This effectively does the same as pasting the text into Microsoft Notepad, then selecting it all and copying it out again, removing all the formatting in the process.

My initial tests have been encouraging.

Gareth @ St Andrews

T44U

We’re just back from the T44U Conference in Dublin. It was great to meet up with so many users and renew acquaintances with many familiar faces.

There was a lot to take in with information about 6.2, discussions on the direction for 7.0 and news on the launch of the Extranet. We certainly left with a few new ideas and a positive outlook on the coming developments.

There was some discussion of the creation of a T4 user group which seemed to be welcomed by all. We at Strathclyde (and I imagine across the Scottish Web Folk T4 users) would certainly be supportive of this. Until then I’ll reiterate the invitation for any institutional users of T4 to feel free to contribute to this Blog and if the main Scottish Web Folk meeting is splitting into software specific streams including T4 then anyone should feel welcome to pop along.

Follow up to “How to reorder Media Library categories”

This is intended as a follow up to the highly informative “How to reorder Media Library categories” with some more media library hacks.

1. Other ways to access the Media Library

An interesting way to access the media library is to use the following url:

http:///terminalfour/SiteManager?ctfn=hierarchy&sid=3335

You can also use

http:///terminalfour/SiteManager?ctfn=hierarchy&sid=3335&PIntLoc=3335

This gives you the hierarchy view of the Media Library as opposed to the modify section view so moving, duplicating and so on are now possible.

(The 3335 is our media section id see “How to reorder Media Library categories”.)

2. Set group access to Media Library sections

You can also go into the Media Library sections and set up group access to them. This speeds up user configuration and management.

1. Navigate to relevant section.
2. Go to group tab.
3. Assign group.
4. Update.

Result when user is assigned to group they automatically get media library access.

3. Preview the Media Library

It is also possible to preview you media library from this view. (This requires write-access to the database.)

1. Add a new channel in the usual way.
2. For the root select any section.
3. Now in the database using the id of the channel, update the channel table to make the root value the media section id (e.g. 3335).
4. Add the formatter you require to the media template.
5. Add your style to the root media section.
6. Preview away.

Harry @ Strathclyde

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