Pledge Support February 2008: Recent CM Software Updates By mu on Mar 08 2008, last modified on Apr 22 2009.

I've been fairly busy lately with all the snow and snowboarding and other important things but I managed to get some work done too. Here's a quick summary of the recent changes to the CM software.

CMS

Most of the recent changes were in the CMS so I'll start there.

We had a bug in the GUI editor we use for uViews. Links weren't appearing in the editor in Firefox: the links were there but they it wasn't visually obvious that they were links. A bit of investigation and some style sheet hackery cleared that up.

We used to append a link's host name to the link; for example, a link to Google used to appear in uViews as Google  [google.ca]. This tended to make uViews look a bit messy so we took it out. We still append the the host name notation to links in comments though.

We have private comment threads in the CMS so that authors, editors, and publishers can talk to each other about uViews. Comments in these threads are now emailed to the other interested parties when they made. This should help people keep on top of what's going on with their uViews.

The uView summaries that appear in listings (such as on the homepage or section pages) are now big links so you can just click on the summary to view the whole uView. I left the titles as normal links so people that like to use tabs can still Ctrl-click or Cmd-click to open uViews in new tabs.

The uView summaries that appear in listings are automatically generated. I've cleaned up the summary generation to, hopefully, produce good enough summaries most of the time. If the automatic summary isn't good enough, you can now write a summary yourself. The generated summaries should be okay if your uView is mostly text and you remember your essay writing guidelines from high school but you'll probably want to write your own if you're posting a bunch of pictures, a flyer, or something else that uses a lot of formatting.

I spent a fair bit of time doing a general cleanup of the CMS. We have a new main page, a search based interface for looking at your uViews, cancel actions should return to sensible places, a menubar at the top for accessing common functions, and sundry other tweaks and adjustments.

Search

There have been a couple of little changes in the search system:

• Search results now display ratings (as applicable).
• You can now search for just published content, just archived content, or both. You'll see this option in the advanced search.

We've also added our help files to the search index. The help files are what you see when you click on any of the icons throughout the site.

Feeds, Alerts, Bulletins, or Whatever You Call Them

All of the above are ways for people to know when new content is available. I call them feeds because I use RSS. We call them bulletins when they're sent by email. Some people call them alerts but, to me, an alert is what I get when a server computer falls over and catches fire and I don't want to get those every day.

We now have a feed for new polls. You will find this feed in the subscribe box on poll pages.

We also have a feed for new quotes. This feed can be found in the subscribe box on quote pages; you can click on View Quote in the quote boxes to get to a quote's homepage.

Feed users will notice Updated 1 Time and Updated 20 Times (not Updated 1 Time(s) though) notations in the content titles. These notes let you know if something is new or if it has just been updated. We tried adding this notation to titles in various other places but it just looked messy and cluttered; we still have the Updated icon ( ) around so you can see which uViews were updated after they were published.

Other Stuff You Can See

We made a small change to how we send email to friends emails. We used to send one email to each address but now we just send one email: the first address in the list is the To address and the rest are Cc'd. This should make your message make more sense when you're talking to several people and will let everyone you emailed see who else is involved.

Some of you may have noticed that the site looks a bit prettier lately. We're still working on this, we should be done (for now) shortly. This would have been a lot easier if browsers bothered to implement the W3C standards; yes, I'm looking at you "every web browser that I've ever used".

And Some Stuff You Can't See

I spent a fair bit of time cleaning up the internals and caching various things. These changes were mostly to help me keep things running smoothly and to keep the servers from falling over and catching fire. Hopefully no one will notice any of this.

Tagged As: About CM Citizens Media Informative System News

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