Posts Tagged ‘editor’

This morning, we have released a small improvement to the College CMS editor.  This development adds a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view of the content you are editing.  This means that when you open the editor (by clicking on the ‘Edit content’ link) in a right column area or on a page using the wide template, the editor form adjusts the width accordingly.  So now the content is as near as possible to what you will see when you publish it to the web page.

This is the first part of a substantial development of the editor over the next few months which you’ll hear more about at a future Web Forum presentation.

Note: On some browser versions you may find that the editor form opens in a strange place on the screen.  This is a computer cache issue and you will therefore need to refresh your cache by pressing CTRL-F5.  This only needs to be done once.

Some of you may have been experiencing difficulties using the CMS Editor this week. I understand that the page view in the Editor window is not displaying the CMS elements as you would expect to see them on the page, and that there have also been issues with the Table Wizard.

The reason for these problems was a fix we implemented into the Editor last Friday to correct a separate issue to do with image realignment. Unfortunately, the process of implementing this fix created these two new bugs. We hope to release a fix for the Editor view and the Table Wizard this Friday (and we’re crossing our fingers this doesn’t release a bug into something else!).

In the meantime, if you are having any difficulties using the Editor, please contact your Faculty Web Officer:
Faculty of Engineering – vacancy (please contact Peter Gillings in the first instance)
Faculty of Natural Sciences – Lucy Stagg
Imperial College Business School – Angela Jariwala
Support Services – Peter Gillings

In preparation for the new academic year, we need to upgrade the old CMS servers.  They are now 5 years old and having served us well, need to be retired.   The new servers will ensure the College has a reliable and faster (Linux based) system for our users.  With this upgrade we are also updating the security of the system and improving the speed and efficiency of the website disaster recovery process.

This upgrade is scheduled to start at 18.00 on Monday 6 September and finish at 18.00 on Sunday 12 September.  At some time that weekend, the switch to the new production servers will happen.  This will cause a brief website outage.

During the upgrade process, the College website will be visible to the public, but we need to disable the process for editing content within the CMS.  This will prevent site editors making any changes to the live system.  This is a precaution as any changes made after the process has started would be lost when the new system goes live.

However, if you need to make an urgent change to your site during the upgrade, there will be a select team of people who will be able to do this for you.  This will be on the understanding that you will have to re-enter the changes when new system goes live.  We will distribute information about who to contact nearer the time.

Should you want to discuss this upgrade in further detail, please contact us (s.croghan@imperial.ac.uk ).

We will contact you again soon to give you further details and contact information.

All of us as College website editors will regularly use the editor window to create pages and update our content. And I’m sure we all agree that there is plenty that could be done to improve the usability of the editor form and the ease of which you can use the more colourful elements of the College website design.

I’m pleased to let you know that we are currently working on a project to significantly improve the functionality of the website editor form. The main improvements planned as part of this project include the following:

(1) Improving the actual editor form, including:

See below for design screengrabs.

(2) Improving table functionality, allowing for easy adding and deleting of columns and rows.

(3) Making pasting content into the form easier and more accurate, removing unnecessary code often added when content is pasted in from word. This will also ensure that code not supported by the College design and CSS is no longer able to be added. Existing code that doesn’t meet College design standards will also be removed.

(4) Allowing multiple instances of the form to be open at the same time – so you can edit more than one page at once without losing your work.

(5) Enhancements to the image cropping tool to enable this to completely replace the old image upload button.

(6) Addition of new wizards to enable site owners to use many of the more complicated elements of the website design on their pages, including:

• Columns
• Call out boxes
• Images with captions
• RSS feeds
• Reminder blocks
• Adverts

If there are other improvements that you’d like to see in the website editor, please comment on this post to let us know.

We’ll also be looking for some website editors to spend a little bit of time testing the new editor system as it develops. If you think you could spare an hour to try out the new editor and give us your feedback, please get in touch with Elizabeth Atkin.

We’ll keep you posted on the timescale for releasing improvements, but we hope that the first phase of this project (incorporating the new form, better table functionality, code cleaning and multiple instances of the form) in July 2010.

Current editor design:

Proposed new editor design: