404 Page is Found!

For the unthinkable scenario where there's a broken link on your site, Site Studio provides a custom Error page. For reasons unfathomable it doesn't return a 404 HTTP header. Here's how to avoid all the problems this creates by adding the header.

SSP Exclude and other quirks

SSP (Site Studio Publisher) is a welcome replacement to the awkward SSPU. Like its predecessor, it is a tool for publishing a dynamic website as a bunch of simple HTML files. But it's got a few quirks you should know about if you want to get it working (and the manuals don't mention this stuff!)

Static Publish of Query String URLs & Dynamic Pages

The Site Studio Publisher (SSP) and the pre-11g versions (SSPU) are tools that take your virtual dynamic SiteStudio website and convert it into a bunch of fair-dinkum files. This does mean that all "dynamic" functionality is lost, including any query string variables in the URL. But there actually is a way for SSP to produce multiple pages from a URL query string.

SiteStudio 11g preview

I've stumbled across the documentation for SiteStudio 11g on the Oracle website.

The documentation is more extensive than previous versions. It includes previously undocumented configuration flags, idoc script extensions and services, and custom element form APIs. Some nice gems in there.

It looks like the 10gR4 format for region definitions has become the standard, the 10gR3 and earlier versions are considered "legacy" format. Unfortunately 11g does not look like it will support other scripting languages, rumoured to include PHP, and the pre-existing support of ASP & JSP is still restricted to legacy sites.

In fact, it just looks like the very latest 10gR4 rebranded. But is this a good thing or bad thing? Content Server 11g will require WebLogic and other new infrastructure bits so maybe minimal tinkering to websites is a good idea for now. My favourite gripe, the LinkWizard has not been touched but at least the Contribution Window has dumped the tiny floppy disk icon for a big "Save" button.

The big change is the improved SSPU. Now called "Site Studio Publisher" it is a Content Server component and it can be accessed directly from the Content Server menus. It finally provides the ability to crawl and publish a specific page on demand, rather than the whole site - which contributors can do themselves, right from the page! It has a typical Content Server interface and can support specified custom querystrings in page URLs. It still supports post-crawl filters and post-publish triggers, but best of all, it appears to be compatible with 10gR3.

The SiteStudio documentation can be accessed here:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/doc.1111/e10615/toc.htm

Useful SSPU logging

Well I haven't started rewriting the hyperlink wizard, my apologies. I've been wrestling with SSPU which has failed to publish our site repeatedly over the last two weeks. In an effort to work out what the hell was going on we turned on all the logging, right up to "debug for all". It was too much to be helpful... so after reviewing the logs I was able to come up with some meaningful logging levels.

PRIMARY LOG (FILE)
default: ERROR
syndicator: INFO
date-time: CRITICAL
analyser: CRITICAL
replicator: INFO
packagemanager: INFO
ice.cache: VERBOSE
delivery: INFO
delivery.ice: VERBOSE

SECONDARY LOG (DATABASE)
default: ERROR

Ok let's start with the database log. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but database logging slows down the software tremendously - it needs to read the entire database to display the SSPU status page (so make sure you purge often!) When you're viewing the SSPU website the only thing you care about is errors. Ignore everything else.

The primary log file is what you turn to when there is a problem. Set Syndicator to INFO to report the overall status of SSPU. It also includes info about database purges. Set Analyzer to CRITICAL to ignore messages about malformed links (they won't affect the publish anyway.) Set Replicator to INFO - this reports which files are actually being processed. It also includes final summaries and error counts. Set Delivery to INFO to report when a job is pushed to the subscription client/FTP (subagent). Set Delivery.ice to VERBOSE in order to report the status of the subagent's delivery and see an actual confirmation message that the publish succeeded. Finally there is a meaningless bug in the interface so I set date-time to CRITICAL so it won't get reported.

There are two additional settings you might consider. Set Packagemanager to INFO in order to see exactly which files have been selected (or skipped) for update. Set Ice.cache to VERBOSE in case there are some undelivered files floating around - it reports what items are waiting to be delivered.

One final important tip - Delivery.ice may report warnings about ice 501 errors. These can safely be ignored. They simply mean that SSPU was asking for confirmation that the job was finished but the subscription client (subagent) was too busy processing the job to respond. SSPU will keep resending the job until it receives a 200 confirmation - but subagent will only process the first push and ignore the rest. Once subagent finishes it sends confirmation, SSPU stops pushing and subagent discards all the repeated pushes. This is the intended behaviour.

Oh and the problem with our publish? Too many broken links!