Santa Clara University

The Profile element, and a few others in Commonspot, allow you to re-use existing content in other pages by selecting data with a custom filter.  Find out more about using filters to select data for display in this overview and tutorial.

We've removed access to the Profile Element temporarily - this element contributed to the cms server problems we experienced this week.  We will be working with this element early next week, and expect to have access to it restored fairly soon, although it may be a few days.  Please contact Russ or Brian if you have questions or concerns about this change.

The text formatting options normally available in the Commonspot text editor's Style menu are missing if you're using Firefox - they do appear for IE8.  A set of patches released today by Paperthin fixes this problem - we've installed those on the development server, and will schedule these to be applied on the cms server on Monday, 3/8.

We have a new element available that presents a form allowing users to subscribe to receive email notifications when a blog or RSS feed is updated.  This uses Feedburner on the back end to handle the subscriptions and sending email.  Read more about this on the Web Publishing site.

Add a Facebook "share" button to any Commonspot page.  You'll find this new element in the Page Tools section of the Element Gallery.

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with some regularity it wouldn't be recommended to print the entire publication, since some of the material will become out of date with future system upgrades.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.

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.

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.