These discussions of various tools leave many of the details as an "exercise for the reader." We hope that by the time you get to this, you will be comfortable in CommonSpot. If we are in error, please let us know!
This is the same dialog box that you see whenever you log in to CommonSpot.
This creates a mechanism to notify you when it is time to review page content to see whether any updates are needed. You can also mark content as expired, so that it will not be visible to non-administrators. When content has expired, you can set CommonSpot to automatically redirect any non-administrator who attempts to access the page, taking that user to the proper URL of your choice.
Some of the people who try to access the expired page will do so by following a link from another CommonSpot page. For those people, you can speed their access to the proper URL by telling CommonSpot to update any other CommonSpot page that has a link leading to the expired page, changing the destination of that link. That method is discussed online under the title, "Referring Pages."
You would still also do the steps below, for the benefit of people who come to your expired page from another system, and to prevent any other pagemaster or content contributor from linking to your expired page.
The bug in CommonSpot V 4.6.1, that caused the Rename Page... command to destroy your page irretrievably has now been fixed.
When you rename a page, it will not let you over-write an existing page. If you have a page that should replace an existing page (e.g., "new_index" should replace "index"), perhaps because you have re-built it using a different template, then you must first delete the existing page or rename it (e.g., to "old_index"), and then rename the new page in to replace it. There will unavoidably be a short period of time when anyone attempting to access the page will be told that it doesn't exist.
When you move or rename a CommonSpot page, any CommonSpot pages with links to that page will be updated to point to the page in its new location or new name, provided that those links were constructed with the Page Gallery or Page Finder dialogs. Therefore, if you are using the rename command to replace an existing page, we suggest that you first go to the old page, use the "Referring Pages" process, discussed elsewhere, to point all internal-to-CommonSpot links to the new page, and then do the rename process.
If you want to change the subsite or sub-subsite where the page is located, use the move option in the "Copy/Move Page..." process, discussed earlier.
The "My Tasks" feature is not currently enabled on Ohio University's CommonSpot system. If it is enabled in the future, you would start using it by clicking on the "Page & Template Management" icon to display the menu, and choosing "My Tasks" from the menu.
CommonSpot's Version History mechanism provides some of the capabilities that the VMS Front Door system achieved with its "version number" file system: you can see what the site content used to be, and restore it to an earlier state. Not all changes are recorded in the Version History, though, so some manual restoration may also be required. In particular, changes that take effect immediately, as discussed previously, including features that can be changed using the "Page Properties" dialogs, such as render options and page background color, are not recorded in the Version History. Only versions that had (yellow) work-in-progress icons and were approved for public visibility ("published") will be included in the version history. When the current version is the first and only version ever published, no list may be generated. All prior versions are in the database, but the length of time that prior versions are reported in the Version History list is limited. That limit can be set on a subsite-wide basis; the default currently in place for Ohio University's CommonSpot installation is 30 days. You can also change this value for a specific page using the "Document Information" dialog.
As you will see in the steps below, CommonSpot provides a mechanism for you to restore prior content. At this time, such restoration to a prior version must be done manually, one element at a time: there is no method available that puts the entire page back to the way it was. Restoration includes only element states that were published; cosmetic changes that occur immediately, without having to be submitted for publication, are not available in the Version History, and so cannot be restored.
In prior versions of CommonSpot, the use of the Version History feature to recover previous content could not be relied upon to function as expected. Therefore, until we have accumulated more positive experience with the current version of CommonSpot, we urge you always to make a copy, using a different filename, of the current version of the page before you attempt to use Version History to recover a prior version of the page's content. This will preserve the current version only -- the version history is not copied along with the file, only the current version. If your efforts succeed, then do your housekeeping, and delete that saved copy of the page.
If you want to restore the page to a state in which an element that currently exists was not present, then delete that element from the current version.
In the example illustration below, the June 1, 2003 version was restored on August 20, 2003:
This feature works only to list pages whose authors chose "Inform User Community" when they submitted the change or whole page for publication. Most Ohio University CommonSpot subsite pagemasters and content contributors are not in the habit of checking that box in the publication dialog, so this feature is presently of very limited value here.
The Page Finder dialog permits you to find pages based on a wide range of criteria, including information about the pages that is internal to CommonSpot.
CommonSpot maintains two internal databases of keywords that apply to each page: those provided by the page's author through the Page Properties dialog, which are visible to all logged-in CommonSpot users and are included in the META tags of the generated page, and those provided by other individual CommonSpot users, which are visible to themselves only, while using CommonSpot.
The following procedure can be used to find pages according to the keywords that have been assigned to them within CommonSpot:
The following procedure can be used to add personal keywords for the page currently being displayed:
You may also choose keywords from the list provided when you click on the "Select keywords..." button.
Do not use the "Search..." option from the "Knowledge Maps" menu, because it requires a server feature that we have not enabled at Ohio University. Instead, go to the Front Door or any page constructed on the official_pages1 template, and use the search feature in the upper-right corner.
If you need more control of your search, use the existing custom search capabilities.
The contact information will be available in "Read" mode to anyone who has the Knowledge Maps icon and menu available (any page whose subsite general security or specific page security permits the CommonSpot Interface; by default this applies for the "authenticated" category, those who have used their OAK login ID and password in this session). It is not routinely available to the anonymous audience category.
Click on the "Knowledge Maps" icon to display the menu, and choose "My Notes" from the menu.
These notes are visible to you alone, and can be seen and revised when in "Read" mode or when in "Author" mode.
The "Knowledge Maps" includes a "See-Also References" tool. Because the information is internal to CommonSpot, you should generally instead choose to make an explicit, visible (text or graphic) link to whatever you might be tempted to list as a See-Also Reference.
Copyright © 2008 Ohio University. All Rights Reserved.
Dick Piccard revised this file (http://www.ohiou.edu/pagemasters/commonspot/pageadv/tools.html) on October 8, 2008.
Please E-Mail comments or suggestions to"webteam@ohio.edu".