News
Miscellaneous Links Wednesday, September 19, 2007 The ability to cross-reference foreign sites has been greatly enhanced with the addition of a few maintenance pages in the Publishing module for managing these "Links" or "Resources", as they are often called. Although the gathering of miscellaneous urls from various sites targeting a similar audience as your site is a common practice of SEO or Search Engine Optimization outfits, this new feature also allows the simple publishing of Google AdWords™ style advertisements.
Events and Invitations Friday, June 22, 2007 The old calendar pages have come back, along with the ability to send emails announcing and perhaps inviting people to register for your events, which requires a custom web page to be built with a simple form that posts the registrant data through a standard api into the framework database where a report is already available showing who registered and who chose not to receive any more emails from you. There is still more work to do, like allow custom invitation letters to be entered through the browser, display the events as a calendar and perhaps provide a default registration form within the framework, but the basic functionality is there.
Upgraded Stylesheets Sunday, March 4, 2007 The Stylesheet Manager now supports bordered sections/boxes with rounded corners and other custom edge treatments, like a drop shadow. Of course, you have to create your own images, but the new css classes provide even more flexibility in design choices now that the basic page layout is built using <DIV> tags instead of tables (for the most part), which also gives most browsers a performance boost when rendering pages. Try "Demo" in the Styles menu above. Unfortunately, some browsers, like Internet Explorer, will sometimes fail to render properly immediately after switching to a new, more complex stylesheet from the "Styles" menu above, so your users may have to refresh the page once or twice when switching styles. Once a style has been chosen, a cookie is set so it will be applied on all subsequent visits to the site. And like before, an Administrator may elect not to give their users the option to switch stylesheets at all, so in this case, after upgrading a "locked" stylesheet, you may want to publish a news item, or even send an email, that introduces the new look and to suggest that they refresh the page to "clear the cache".
Sites are Up! Monday, February 5, 2007 A milestone occurred this morning, which had the unfortunate effect of causing the database to quit working and disabling all of the web sites. We ran out of disk space! The database has been extended and all is well now. Thank you for your patience.
Enhanced Security Friday, December 8, 2006 All of the security options on a User Profile are now cascading, meaning that you can no longer grant more privileges than have been granted to you. This really only affects Workgroup Administrators, which until now have been absolute masters of their domain, with nearly all of the privileges and authority of a Site Administrator, only limited to their Workgroup. But now a Site Administrator can assign a highly restricted User Profile to a Workgroup Administrator, which would constitute the maximum privileges that any User within that Workgroup can possess. For instance, a Site Administrator could elect to prevent all of the Users of a particular Workgroup, including the Administrator, from creating new folders at the root level of the Workgroup, which is something the Workgroup Administrator could override in the past. Another example would be to permanently bar the "Files" module from an entire Workgroup. Note that this cascading security also applies within the Site Administrator Workgroup, but in this case, only the file access privileges can be restricted, not the navigation options, since Site Administrators need to go everywhere in the site. Also note that these privileges settings only apply to the particular user's Workgroup; when accessing other public Workgroups, the default privileges for Guest users will be applied instead of the user's Workgroup privileges (only Site Administrators can change Guest privileges), so if your Workgroup is open to the public, none of this applies to you.
Isolated Workgroups Monday, September 18, 2006 The normal default setting for a public Workgroup (aka Group) is that all Users have access to it, regardless of whether their own Workgroup is public or private. It is standard procedure for most installations to setup at least one public Workgroup (aka "The Public Domain") that everyone can share. However, the Webmaster may want to isolate certain Workgroups, which is to say, prevent all of the Users, including the Administrator, of a particular Workgroup from being able to access (or even know about) any other Workgroup, whether public or private, including "The Public Domain". This option is now available, to Site Administrators only, on the Edit Workgroup page.
|
|