Copy a SiteStudio site? Even easier!

SiteStudio 10gR4 (546) is chock full of awesome new features, one of which is a new way to replicate your site. Yes, the previous article I just wrote about replication is already obsolete. Ha!

The new feature is section level replication and it's pretty nifty. It is enabled via the Designer application and it adds a new section property, called "Ready to replicate." If you switch region content anywhere on a webpage, the property automatically changes to false. You can see this on your webpage in the contribution mode banner as a "replicate" or "don't replicate" button. Now I have to confess... I haven't got a system set up to test this new replication functionality but I assume it is all part of the Manage Site Replication page*. Archiver should rebuild the project file on import and ignore the sections where "Ready to replicate" is false. Why did I say Archiver "should" rebuild? I haven't found a shred of documentation to explain any of this stuff, I'm just guessing (it only got a mention in the release notes textfile.)

Some other awesome features in recent SiteStudio releases include:

• Compare renditions - any renditions, not just the latest! On the Content Information page, in the revision history table, a new column is appended that allows you to compare the current revision to any other revision, future or past.
• Setting a default page name (instead of manually changing index.htm)
  SSDefaultUrlPageName=default.html
  
• Downloading images and documents from a friendly URL (the current directory) not the WebLocation (buried in the /groups/public/documents directories.)
  SSEnableDirectDelivery=true
  
• Oh and those stubbornly clinging to the Ephox editor, don't forget the "ondemand" editors option that was included a few releases prior. It lets you say how many elements get loaded automatically and how many must be clicked on to load. If your page has more than three or four elements then Ephox (Java) is likely to hang your machine, so this setting is a godsend.
  SSUseOnDemandEditors=true
  

There's more great features too, so do yourself a favour and upgrade.

* UPDATE
Section Level Replication works great! I was right, it works via the "Manage Site Replication" page with Archiver. Note that the project file's native file is modified to exclude sections but not the weblayout file. Strange but true.

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!

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?

Unlocking the power of Ephox

The geniuses at Oracle have added Ephox as the new Contribution editor - but crippled it to make it look like their old editor. Newsflash to Oracle - the old editor sucked, why are you making the new one pretend to work the same as the old one?

Ephox comes with a WordCount feature, Find/replace, forms editing and even multimedia support. It has a menubar and can be configured for multiple toolbars. Why did Oracle remove these features?

Anyway, to turn that stuff back on you just need to edit the XML config file. Naturally the Oracle guys thought that was too simple so they generate the XML "on the fly" from a Javascript file. To edit the config for the wysiwyg element, hack this file:
/weblayout/resources/wcm/sitestudio/elements/wysiwyg/wysiwyg.config.js

The XML syntax you need can be found in the Developer guide at the Ephox website.
http://www.ephox.com/developers/editliveforjava/v60/DeveloperHTML/index.html

Overall I'm pretty happy with the Ephox editor. My big gripe is that it uses a Java applet - Ephox seem to have abandoned any non-Java versions. Applets are horrible on websites - all your contributors will need Java on their machines. I've seem some weird repainting from the applet and it can be unstable, it's slow to load, who knows which Java version to trust. I mean, I'm on a webpage, I'm editing a webpage, it's rendering a webpage - why force it through Java? Hmmm I appear to be ranting, let me start again...

Overall I'm pretty happy with the Ephox editor. Apart from relying on a silly applet :) the code it produces is clean and well structured. Ephox have some nifty features like Accessibility reports, thesaurus and WordCount. I've upgraded to SiteStudio260 and the Ephox java is quite stable. The only hiccup I've had was that it couldn't tell the difference between a print and a screen stylesheet. I put a few support requests through to the Ephox people and they responded promptly and helpfully. If you're considering an upgrade, go for it.

Finally - the new Contributor Editor!

After much pleading and praying Oracle are finally ready to release the upgrade to the Contribution Editor. It has not yet been released but I got a pre-release to play with.

It uses Ephox (java-based) to provide a wysiwyg editor that works on any computer. It required two or three CS upgrade/patches to get running but that wasn't a big drama.

Highlights include the ability to write headings (yay!) easy switch-to-code view, enhanced table & image formatting options (includes deleting cells & rows) and overall the generated code is nicer. It also features an Accessibility Report. I like the way that the metadata screen is now available as a tab instead of popping up before every save.

So far I've found the java-based ephox to be a bit flaky - no word on the preferred java version (I'm using v6.5). Hopefully I can dump it for the javascript-based ephox.