Santa Clara University

The power outage planned for Monday, 12/28 at SCU should not impact availability of the Web site.  The servers are located in the IT Data Center, which has a backup power supply.  We do expect a short duration outage for Internet connections to and from the campus early on the 28th, while a change is made with the university's Internet Service Provider.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.