Tinkering with the search query

Sometimes the search query isn't enough. Sometimes the administrator needs to add a few restrictive clauses or maybe inject some SQL to tweak the results. Content Server is very careful about tidying up search strings which means that modifying search behaviour is not something that can be done with Idoc. But access points do exist that provide a safe way to unobtrusively alter the query.

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.