News
New Development Model Supported Monday, August 31, 2015 A new way of creating updatable lists has been introduced using a simple popup form, with fields optionally pre-populated from the selected line of the report (using DOM discovery), which then posts to a web service via an ajax call. Using this approach, the first step would be to create an Ad Hoc Report with at least one checkbox property (preferably for the first column) and then attach a listener to that checkbox, which will control subsequent behavior when clicked, such as running another report or opening a form page or popping-up a form. You can also add one or more buttons in the left side panel which are setup as filters in Column Properties but actually can do anything you want via a listener. It should no longer be necessary to write a specific report script to drive a form page. However, you will still probably want to write specific form scripts if there are too many fields or there are other UI considerations that prevent the use of a simple popup form. Essentially, this moves more coding into javascript from php, but you will still have to write a php web service and sp script to handle the posting of data. Your custom javascript is typically stored in one or more files in a separate folder in your application directory, which is loaded by the site_specific script that is automatically run on every page.
Single Instance CoBranding Saturday, September 6, 2014 CoBranding allows your site to serve different content, including stylesheets, depending on the domain. You have always been able to change the content of the framework, and by extension your custom site, by either assigning a specific domain to a unique workgroup or by creating an entirely new instance of the framework, including a new database. But what if you only wanted a single instance of both the application and the database, but still have the flexibility of organizing your content into various workgroups? For instance, you might have a membership site organized into groups, where each group sees different content, but still having a central list of users and permissions, perhaps to support Active Directory or some other SSO scheme. Now you can additionally organize your articles, email templates and offers by cobrand/domain while still maintaining a central repository of users, profiles, workgroups, images and files. To enable cobranding, setup a domain for each cobrand and create a configuration file for each domain, making sure to add the new SITE_TOKEN setting to each configuration with a short, unique string for identifying each cobrand (you will be selecting this cobrand string on various forms). Then login again via a cobrand-specific domain and review your existing email templates, articles and offers to see if any need to be duplicated and changed for that cobrand. If a cobranded version does not exist for a particular domain, the system will serve the "All Cobrands" content. Note that workgroup restrictions and profile access rights still apply regardless of the domain so your custom site may need to control privileges across workgroups based on an additional mapping between the cobrand and the workgroups that belong to the cobrand. Alternatively, you could put all users in the public domain and simply use the workgroups to organize your links, images and files for easier management.
Searching for Articles Thursday, August 21, 2014 You can now search for news items and articles in the local language. If the article has not been translated, then the English version will be displayed. News items and the synopsis of articles are first translated using the automated tool with the expectation that an authorized user will improve it later using the Translation Tool pages. The full story of an article cannot be translated via the remote services because the AI algorithms do poorly on dense text and any embedded images will also likely need a different translated version, so authorized users will need to manually input new versions of every article in the different languages directly. Also note that entering search criteria in languages other than English will not use the full-text search feature but will instead scan by string match, although all of the extended search operators should still work. To try this out, add "/?locale=ja" to the end of the url of this page and reload, then search by "それを爆破" to find the Japanese version of the "Getting Started" article.
Database Upgrade Friday, July 25, 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is now the minimum version supported. The application will not work on versions older than SQL Server 2008 because of a change in the way large text and media data is being stored. This is a good thing because the application was having to do something special for Microsoft and now there is only one method for handling text and binary blobs for all RDBMS vendors.
Translation Automation Wednesday, July 16, 2014 A new automated process has been implemented that periodically searches for any recently added messages and if a translation does not already exist for the specified locale, will call either the Google or MyMemory API (depending on the configuration) and post the translated response into the database. It will also check if any messages have been changed and if a proposed translation does not exist, calls the translator service. But these services use machine algorithms which must be verified and approved before the translations are deployed, so this automated process is treated just as if an authorized user submitted a suggested new translation manually. Typically, a cron job would be setup to run the new process for each locale that you wanted to support (the locale must be marked as supported in the Languages and Locales report). Also, because these translation services are free and have bandwidth limitations, each process will only perform 100 calls per run. If you do too many calls per day, you could be denied service, so it is best to run one job per night per locale if you are deploying a brand new application and extracting lots of messages out of your code via the post_message REST service.
Translation Tool Tuesday, February 18, 2014 The Translation Tool has been improved to support plurals correctly. It can also both import and export po files in multi-line format. There is also a new feature where a developer can specify a particular locale in the configuration script which will cause the system to automatically post into the translation database any messages that were not found when testing that locale via the new post_message REST service. These new messages can then be easily listed and either sent out to be translated as an exported po file or a new translation entered directly into the tool.
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