Santa Clara University

Web Publishing @ SCU

Blog Feature

This element would be used as a companion to a Commonspot blog element. With this element, you can display one or more featured items on your home page, or any other page in your Commonspot site. The element will display the featured items' title and description, and provide a link to the page that includes the full blog. Optionally, you can include the titles of one or more recent, but not "featured" items in your blog.

The blog feature on this page provides an example. If no items in the blog were set to be "featured", the element will display the most recently posted blog item.

Custom Settings

The only required parameter for this element is a blog channel id. When you add the element to your page, you'll see a list of the available Commonspot blogs and their corresponding channel ids.

Example:

 channel_id=21
Display Options

Instead of featuring the most recent post, or items set as featured in the full blog, you can set this element to randomly select an item from the blog and display it as featured. You can also modify the background color of the element. And by default the element will display two recent posts. If you want to change this to show more or less, supply a number in the "recent_posts" parameter. If you set this to zero, the Recent Posts heading and list will not appear.  You may also choose to display the featured blog posts in a list, instead of the default featured view.

Examples:

style=red (options are: red, gold, and beige - default is beige)
recent_posts=3 (default is "2")
random=true (default is "false")

This would randomly select a featured item from all blog posts, set the background color of the Web Publishing blog (channel_id 21) feature element to "red", and increase the number of recent posts to three.

display=list

Setting the display attribute to "list" will render the featured blog posts using the directory list style.
 
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Web Publishing News

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Web Publishing News

  • iconFlickr Slideshow Gallery option

    A new display option is available for the Flickr Slideshow Element, which will display the Flickr images as a gallery with sharing options and image descriptions. Select the "gallery" display mode in the Flickr Slideshow element, which you'll find in the Content Well element category.

    Apr. 17, 2013 | Permalink | More Info
  • iconIE 10 and Commonspot

    Microsoft is automatically updating Internet Explorer for Windows 7 users from version 9 to version 10 today. IE 10 has not been certified for Commonspot authoring, and access to the authoring dashboard will fail. Paperthin is working on a patch for this, but for the interim you'll need to use Firefox for Commonspot authoring on Windows. Alternatively, you can use the developer tools built into IE to switch to the IE 9 profile. You can access the developer tools via the F12 key.

    Feb. 27, 2013 | Permalink
  • iconFirefox ESR auto-update

    Firefox 10 ESR will update to version 17, unless you have turned off auto-updating in Firefox. Version 17 may introduce problems with copying/pasting text in the Commonspot text editor. If you need to re-install FF 10 ESR, you can find it here:

    Windows

    Mac

    You can change how Firefox handles auto-updating via the Options (Windows) or Preferences (Mac) > Advanced tab. By default, it would be set to automatically install updates.

    Feb. 20, 2013 | Permalink
  • iconVideo shortcodes in the blog

    The option to include a Vimeo or Youtube video in the full content text block is now available in the blog. To embed a video, you'd use a shortcode similar to those used in Wordpress:

    code sample

    These references will be converted to embedded video players:

    [vimeo 56033353 w=420&h=235]

    [youtube GGhOlaWk0OY w=420&h=235]

    You'll need to snag the video ID from the URL on Vimeo or Youtube to use in the shortcode.

    http://vimeo.com/56033353

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGhOlaWk0OY

    The width and height settings are optional - the default uses the height/width for the center column of a three-column page layout - but if you wanted to wrap text around this you could do so by reducing the size and then wrapping that in a fixed width div block that's floated left or right.

    Feb. 15, 2013 | Permalink
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