Web Publishing News

Post-upgrade bug: copying a page

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:30:00 PST

Following the upgrade to Commonspot 5.1, we're seeing an error when attempting to copy an existing page - the error reported is "error while generating a unique ID". You can create a new page from a template, but will likely see this error if attempting to copy a page. The bug has been reported to the vendor this afternoon.

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved; the copy-page action works now.

Commonspot 5.1 upgrade

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:02:00 PST

We're upgrading Commonspot to the current version (5.1) on the authoring and production Web servers on Tuesday morning, Nov. 17, starting at around 8am. Commonspot authoring will be unavailable for a short time, but we'd expect that it will be accessible by 9am or so. Replication might be offline a bit longer, while we upgrade Commonspot on the three production servers. We should see that back on schedule by 11am.

UPDATE: The upgrade is complete - authoring and replication have been restored.

Summary text in Event Calendar submissions

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:34:33 PST

When submitting an event to the Campus Event Calendar system, you'll notice a new "summary" field in the event entry form. The summary text will be used in the RSS feed generated for the event calendar, instead of the full event description text.

Commonspot authoring downtime

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:32:09 PST

We're planning an application server upgrade on the cms server on Thursday (10/1) morning. The upgrade is scheduled to start at 8am and should be completed by mid-morning, Authoring access will be unavailable during the upgrade. Sorry for the short notice on this system upgrade - the new version of the application server should improve the performance and server stabiity issues we've been seeing in recent weeks.

SCU Mobile Site

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:03:05 PST

We're working on a prototype for a version of the SCU web site optimized for mobile devices. You can read more about this project and view the mobile site in development at scu.edu/webpublishing/mobile .

Mobile Web Survey

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:19:00 PST

We've assembled an online survey of mobile Web use, intended to gather information about how people at SCU use Web access via mobile devices. If you're using the mobile Web, you're invited to take the survey.

Commonspot Documentation

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:31:00 PST

In yesterday's Commonspot Site Administrator meeting, a request was made for a printed user guide for the CMS. There is Commonspot Contributor Guide (PDF) available - it's a lengthy document, and since the CMS system is updated with some regularity it wouldn't be recommended to print the entire publication, since some of the material will become out of date with future system upgrades.

Restoring the CSS menu in the text editor

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:19:00 PST

The rich text editor includes a menu of CSS styles that can be applied to headings, paragraphs, lists and tables. If you don't see anything in the CSS menu when editing a page, here's how to correct that:

Open the page (or subsite template) in Author mode.
Click "Style Sheets" in the Properties & Actions menu.
Select "Use Style Sheet..."

No changes are necessary in the next form, just click Finish to apply the change.

Missing templates in Template Gallery

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:16:00 PST

Following the Commonspot 5 upgrade, many people have noticed that the Template Gallery doesn't include their own subsite templates. This problem can be corrected by updating the security settings for your template. Here's how to do that:

Open the template in Author mode (you can find the template by selecting from the template hierarchy list in a template-based page).
Select "Template Security" from the Properties & Actions menu.
Click "add a new group" and select Authenticated Users from the group list.
Give this group the "Read" permission, and save that change.

New formatting options in the text editor

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:18:00 PST

The rich text editor element in Commonspot 5 includes a few changes in the way we access the HTML source, along with new options for applying formatting to text via an HTML property inspector, and through an improved Word/markup cleanup utility.

Referring Pages lists aren't complete

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:06:00 PST

If you're checking the "referring pages" list in the Tools & Information menu or the Subsite Admin page reports, be advised that the lists of pages are not complete. Any link reference established before the upgrade to Commonspot 5, and not updated since that date, will not appear in these lists. We're working on fixing this issue, but for now the referring pages lists are not reliable.

Editing images in Commonspot

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:00:00 PST

Commonspot 5 includes an image editing utility, accessible via the Image Gallery. Use the image editor to resize images, create thumnails, and modify the image position, alignment, brightness and contrast.

Quick Commonspot Login

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:38:00 PST

You can speed up the process of logging in to Commonspot by un-checking the "Show Pending Actions" box in the login form. This is checked by default, and will generate a list of pages waiting for approval, work-in-progress, and broken link reports. If you're just logging in for a quick page edit, you can bypass these reports and save some processing time for Commonspot by unchecking that box when you log in.

Web Server Database Change

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:26:00 PST

On Tuesday morning (7/14) one of the database servers that supplies content for the www site failed - this caused sites such as the Phonebook, Event Calendar, and Commonspot blogs and surveys to display errors while the server was offline. On Tuesday night, this database was migrated to new hardware. If you notice that updates or new data submitted on Tuesday to any system on www is not displaying as expected, please contact Brian Washburn in Media Services (x1993).

Update: The outage scheduled (mentioned in today's Site Admin meeting) for 4 to 4:30pm has completed, and access to the blog, survey, and event admin consoles has been restored.

Template Gallery Issue

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:23:03 PST

Following the Commonspot 5 upgrade, we're seeing an issue with the Template Gallery listing; some user's templates are not listed in the gallery. If you're creating a new Commonspot page and don't see the template you need in the Gallery, the work-around is to copy an existing page that's based on the template you want, and save that as your new page. We hope to have the Template Gallery issue resolved fairly soon.

Commonspot 5 Upgrade

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:50:00 PST

Commonspot was upgraded to version 5 this morning. If you haven't yet seen the overview of Commonspot 5 in the Web Publishing site, you might want to review that - there are some user-interface changes for authoring.

Survey System Updates

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:38:00 PST

The survey system now includes a few changes - the most significant change is that you'll no longer be required to "activate" a survey in order for it to be published - the availability of a survey form will now be controlled by its publication dates. With this change, you will now be able to modify the survey form once it is in use - previously, changes to the survey required that the data be cleared and the survey de-activated first. That's no longer required.

Other changes in this update include: create "views" to display survey results easily, an "attachment/image" field type has been added, questions and question groups can now be copied within a survey, and survey questions can be easily moved (drag and drop) to new positions.

Media Player Element and playback controls

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:18:00 PST

When using the Media Player element to embed a SWF video in a Commonspot page, you can optionally set the "controller" script parameter to "true" to display the play/pause/volume controls. The control bar is always displayed for FLV video, but is not shown by default for SWF files.

Blog Manager

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:56:00 PST

The new Blog Manager system is now active. If you maintain blog content in Commonspot, you will now need to login to the Blog Manager to add blog posts, or edit previous posts. If you have questions about this change, or need assistance with the new system, please send a Support Request to the OMC/Media Services Web Publishing team.

Link Style Change

bwashburn@scu.edu (Brian Washburn) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:14:00 PST

The font style and color have changed for text links in SCU Web sites. Previously, links were formatted in bold text with a beige color. We'd received lots of feedback about that style - many people found it difficult to identify links within blocks of text, due to the lack of an underline below the text, and similar color values for standard and linked text. In this style update, links are displayed in red with a dotted-line underline in paragraph text blocks. Links within lists are displayed in red without the underline style, and links within feature elements and the right column elements are displayed in the original style.