Making Pages Findable
- Version 4.5 of CommonSpot provides more fine-grained control of page availability through multiple mechanisms. In V3.2, you could choose to index the page, or not to index the page. Now you have separate control over four different methods for finding your pages, as described below. Unfortunately, we did not notice that after the upgrade, the default for new page creation was set to prevent the page from being found by all four methods. We fixed the default setting late Tuesday morning, July 26, so all new pages from now on will be findable, but all pages created from July 11 through July 26, 2005, should be checked, and will likely need to be re-set, in order that you and others will be able to create CommonSpot-managed links to those pages.
This is a two-step process: identifying the pages that need to be checked, and then checking and re-setting the four options, as needed:
Identifying Pages by Creation Date Range
- Finding pages in a certain creation date range is done from the "My Pages..." dialog, if you created the page, and is done from the admin.cfm "Page, Image, and Link Management Reports" dialog, if anyone created the page in the current subsite. The two dialogs are coded similarly, so that the following steps apply to both:
- Find the field, "Show pages where:"
- choose "creation date" and then
- choose "custom" and click on the calendars to choose the date range (e.g., from July 11 to July 26)
- then click on "submit"
Checking Availability
- In the results page generated by the steps above, click on the black text for the page (not in the check-box), in order to bring the page up in the main browser window. Then perform the following steps:
- Go to Author or Edit mode
- Select Page Properties from the Page and Template Management menu
- Scroll down and find the "Availability" section
- Unless you have some special reason to hide your page, confirm that there are check-marks in the first three of the four boxes:
- Page Index: to include the page in the automatic sitemap, ensuring that our Thunderstone and the various commercial search engines will lead people to your page.
- Page Finder: to permit other CommonSpot authors to build links to your page.
- Page Gallery: to permit other CommonSpot authors to build links to your page.
- Search Results: it does not matter whether the box is checked, or not, because we are not running the internal-to-CommonSpot search engine.
Copying and Pasting in the Rich Text Editor
- Under some circumstances, pasted text does not have the appropriate space character after re-wrapping, where there used to be a line-break. This has been observed with Macintosh Firefox, but may affect other browsers, as well. Proofread your text carefully!
Login Security Certificate
- When you login, your browser may complain that the certificate was issued to "www.ohio.edu" not to "pages.ohio.edu". That is OK.
Publication Date
- Control of the publication date has been moved from the "Document Information" dialog window to the "Page Properties" dialog window. As before, it is available only in "Author" mode.
Login Procedure
- The new server uses the new single-sign-on process, which functions for student and for employee OAK accounts. Therefore, we have retired the former "stulogin.cfm" page, and set it to redirect to "secure.cfm" -- where you will be prompted for your OAK login ID and password. If you have a bookmark or favorite set to go to the old student login page, you can still use it, but it would be sensible to update it.
You can also login by going to your subsite's admin.cfm page.
If you encounter problems logging in with Firefox, check to see whether the login window is hidden behind the main Firefox window. You may also find that you have to click on the "submit" button, instead of being able to just type the "enter" key.
Opening a Link into a New Window
- If you specify a link to be opened into a new window, the default size of the window is smaller now than it used to be. We are still checking to see if there is a sitewide setting to control this behavior. The user can always maximize the window, or manually re-size it, and you can control the initial size, as discussed in the next paragraph, but we agree that it would be more elegant if the window started out full size.
You can control the placement and size of the new window, as you could in V3.2, but the defaults have changed: as soon as you click in the check-box for "open link in a new window" it creates a button named "New Window Properties..."; if you click on that, you will now see that the top, left, width, and height fields are no longer blank. If you simply erase them, the new window is still small, and when you re-edit you will see that the default values have been re-established. Instead, you can achieve a better effect if you fill in more reasonable values (e.g., top=0, left=0, width=762, height=600).
We have requested PaperThin to restore the prior behavior, but are not sure when, or if, that will be available.
Image Gallery
- The image gallery search has been re-designed. Even though they look like they are going to get everyone's images, the default settings will actually pick up your own private images together with the six public images currently on the system, so you can sensibly either just click on the "Show Images" button at the bottom, or first change the Image Type from "All Images" to "Private Images" and then click on the "Show Images" button. If you have uploaded a lot of images, then you can reduce the clutter by selecting the subsite the image lives in, if you know that.
At the present time, if you want to select images by owner, you will discover that the list of image-owners is presented to you in a pop-up menu in pseudo-random order (it appears possible that the order is chronological for the date and time when the user first uploaded an image). We have asked PaperThin to sort that list alphabetically by last name, or at least put the current user at the top. We don't know when that fix will be available. Therefore, after you find yourself or someone else on that list, you can work more efficiently the next time if you take note of where the scroll bar is.
My Pages... Dialog Box
- The My Pages... dialog box now has a submission button, rather than automatically submitting when you change the criteria selections.
Content Expiration
- The Content Expiration dialog used to be available directly as a choice near the bottom of the Page and Template Management menu when you are in Author mode. It has been moved into the Page Properties dialog (at the bottom); Page Properties is the top choice of the Page and Template Management menu when you are in Author mode.
Spell Check
- There are many several action dialogs, including new page creation and change publication, that now have a "check spelling" check-box; spell-checking is currently not activated by default, but a future upgrade to CommonSpot may change that. You can always click on "ignore all," if you forget to un-check it.
Reporting Other Issues and Asking Questions
- Please send all problems, discrepancies, or questions by e-mail to webteam@ohio.edu, with a subject that starts, "CS V4.5 Problem -- ", or "CS V4.5 Question -- ", and include your evaluation of urgency of a response (e.g., critical problem, or just for our information, to help us update and improve the documentation).
Please do not report anything related to Firefox authoring at this time, even if you decide to try it out, but do keep your notes, we will be asking for that information soon.
Resolved Items
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Image Grids
- Horizontal image grids were displaying with a bogus space character between the images. This problem has been fixed.
Pop-up Menus
- Linking to new pop-up menus has now been fixed. As soon as you select "Link to Pop-Up Menu" it will display a list of the pop-up menus defined on that page (either defined directly on that page, or defined in any template from which that page derived).
Image Gallery
- Uploading new images has now been fixed. You can do it from the Image Gallery Search dialog (from the Knowledge Maps menu), or when clicking on the placeholder cartoon after inserting a new image element.
