Santa Clara University

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.

All posts »

Web Publishing News

Commonspot authoring downtime

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.

Sep. 30, 2009
Web Server added to www.scu.edu
A third Web server has been added to the www.scu.edu production cluster. The added server will help to improve reliability and availability for the SCU site. Content on the three www.scu.edu servers will continue to be updated from the cms (Commonspot) server on an automated schedule, currently at 2-hour intervals. Continue reading »
Apr. 25, 2006
Commonspot Content Synchronized
Commonspot content published following the last automated replication on Thursday, 2/2, has been manually copied to the production servers. Continue reading »
Feb. 3, 2006

All posts »

Web Publishing News

Post-upgrade bug: copying a page

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.

Nov. 17, 2009 | Permalink
Commonspot 5.1 upgrade

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.

Nov. 16, 2009 | Permalink
Summary text in Event Calendar submissions

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.

Oct. 30, 2009 | Permalink
Commonspot authoring downtime

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.

Sep. 30, 2009 | Permalink