SiteStudio10gR4 - Region Definitions & Region Templates

Forgive me for back-dating this post but I wanted to mention my excitement over the upcoming release of SiteStudio 10gR4. There was a webcast/webinar/webthingy where Oracle announced a new version (hopefully due in Jan09) where the main new features are region templates and region definitions.

Currently all layouts contains content regions that are defined and styled by settings in the layout. Editable elements in the region are also controlled in the layout. It leaves heaps of non-web code on the page and it is awkward to customise the display of content items. My real-world example is trying to maintain identical element settings in over 40 separate layouts, phew.

The definition of a region is now a separate "Region Definition" xml file. It has all the usual options (edit, info, approve, view differences) plus it now has the element definitions. Element definitions have been expanded, like allowing people to insert Flash as easily as inserting an image. It's separate to layouts, so in my 40-layout example all I would need to do is update the one definition file, instead of each of the 40 layouts. The region definition also controls the assigning of selected region templates.

The "Region Template" is also a separate xml file. It controls the presentation of content inside the region. An example they gave was a template that took a static list content item and displayed it as tabbed panels. Applying a different template changed the list into a flat page of heading & paragraphs. Hmmm... this looks ideal for creating navigation that is not section-based. Yay! They had another example that loaded a dynamic list query of images into a flash object. All the contributor had to do was change the query. Neat.

Other points of interest:
* Easy choice of FCK or Ephox editors
* Override the chosen editor's config or css, per element
* More element types (querys, dropdowns etc)

This brings some real power to contributors and yet it gives tighter control to designers. Impressive! I can't wait.

*****
UPDATE - Oooh oooh the new docco is now available on the Oracle site... it says they updated the LinkWizard! Yay! I can't find a picture... but it seems to work the same? Bah!

Let's play "Component Demo!"

I spent today figuring out why our Excel to PDF conversion was rounding all numbers to two decimal places (it was StarOffice) and trying out some interesting components - PDF Watermark and ContentCategorizer.

PDF Watermark allows you to chuck a watermark on our PDFs either statically or dynamically. Static means that when a document gets checked in, the watermark is added to the PDF and the result is stored permanently as the web-viewable. Dynamic means that the web-viewable PDF is untouched, but whenever someone tries to see it the watermark is magically added. I found static worked great but the dynamic was a total hit-and-miss.

I was excited by ContentCategorizer and the prospect of tags, automatic metadata assignment and maybe even reading values out of the content itself, like recording the camera used to take a photo. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to get it to work. None of that stuff happens out-of-the-box anyway, you need to configure it all, and in true UCM style I mean it does nothing out-of-the-box. The manuals were no help either, this needs a consultant to demo.

Anyway, I was booked in for the "Advanced Site Studio" Oracle course next week but the instructor had his visa rejected. Bugger. I was going to get him/her to write me an "Insert Multimedia" widget for Ephox... now I have to do it myself. After all, the system supports inserting multimedia but, in true UCM style... yeah you know the rest.

Latest Upgrades (the joy of)

I've been busy patching, testing and tweaking our UCM. We're finally on the latest, latest* release and I'm pretty happy about how it's performing.

Ephox got an upgrade too and by switching to the "sun" connection method it can actually display images now, yay. I still haven't figured out how to style the editor to look like each of our layouts (each layout has a fixed width) and darned if I know why our Intranet stylesheets aren't reaching Ephox. Wysiwyg editing? Not quite. And the LinkWizard is still as crappy as ever, total fail in Firefox3.

I also noticed that the size of our fonts are different now when launched from IE compared to FireFox. I'm not sure if it's Oracle UCM or Ephox doing it... looking at the Java Console Logs I can see the stylesheet information is loaded, parsed and rewritten according to rules my "launching browser" might understand. For example, here's what happens to my BODY style...

Actual stylesheet reference:
body { color:#000000; font-size: 70%; }

Launching the editor from Firefox:
body {ephox-visible: false;color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 70%;}

Launching the editor from IE:
BODY {ephox-visible: false;FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif}

"I mean, I'm on a webpage, I'm editing a webpage, it's rendering a webpage - why force it through Java?" - and now it is trying to emulate the current browser? Wow. Is that ultra-smart or epic-dumb... I'm not sure! However if it's not Ephox doing the css emulation then I do apologise to the folks at Ephox. (I should point out that Ephox is a pretty decent editor with more features than others.)

* Update - I've been advised by metalink support that we're not on the latest release of DynamicConverter. There is a newer one not listed on metalink but available via eDelivery. How are we supposed to find this stuff out?