At St Andrews just now we’re working on importing a new website design into SiteManager — which is going very well thanks for asking — but one task that can be a little tiresome is when adding new content that we want to make absolutely sure will only be published to a particular channel.
By default in SiteManager when you add a new content item it is added to all channels — you can see this on the Channels tab (labeled ‘Sites’ in version 5.x of SiteManager) when adding content.
However, if you want to publish your content to only one channel (for example to a test channel) it can be quite a tedious task to untick all but one of the checkboxes, particularly if you’re adding a lot of new content. We current have 26 channels, so that requires unchecking 25 boxes for each item of new content.
One of the wishlist items that we’ve already forwarded to TerminalFour is for the addition of an “Uncheck all” button. But in the meantime …
Clear Fields
I’ve discovered an add-on for Firefox 3 (it does not work with older versions of Firefox) that does this task for you automatically. The add-on is called Clear Fields and adds a new button to your toolbar (it actually adds a few more but you can customize the toolbar to include only the options that you require):
A drop-down arrow to the right of the icon allows you to choose from:
- Clear Text Fields
- Clear Pass Fields
- Clear Checkboxes
with the latter, obviously, being the option you require to uncheck the Channels checkboxes.
So now rather than having to click 25 times to remove each unrequired channel from the list, I now have two clicks:
- Clear Checkboxes button
- Select the channel that I do want
Caveat
A minor caveat about the Clear Fields add-on: it doesn’t work with Firefox 3.0.1 without a little tweaking. If you are familiar with the construction of Firefox add-ons then simply tweak the install.rdf file, otherwise wait for the upgrade.
To make the tweak do the following:
- Download the xpi file.
- Rename the file, adding a .zip extension to the end, i.e. clear_fields-3.0.xpi.zip
- Open the file in WinZip (or similar archiving application).
- Extract the contents to a location of your choosing. You’ll find a folder called chrome and two files: chrome.manifest and install.rdf.
- Open install.rdf in your text editor of choice.
- Change the line <em:maxVersion>3.0.0.*</em:maxVersion> to <em:maxVersion>3.0.1.*</em:maxVersion> then save the file.
- Now use WinZip (or your archiving application of choice) to zip up those three files with no compression. If you use compression it will not work.
- Rename the file again, back to its .xpi (pronounced ‘zippy’) extension.
- Drag and drop the file onto an open Firefox window to begin installation.
It should only take a minute or two to do this … and now you’ve got the ability to untick all the channel checkboxes in one fell swoop.
Gareth @ St Andrews
