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Previously, to password-protect a site or site section, you could only select a Sign In tool within that site section. While that worked for a single section, that meant a separate Sign In tool was needed for each section in a more complex site. Site Builders have been upgraded to support using a single Sign In tool anywhere in your account.
While the Sign In tool would take you to the page or tool you were looking for after signing in, it did not support URLs that contained individual News Feed articles or search parameters. It has been updated to support any of those URLs now.While Unicode support has been available inside the rich text editor for quite awhile, some other critical fields like page name or article headline did not support Unicode characters without users having to resort to using HTML entity coding. Now users can enter whatever special or foreign language characters they like in any of the fields in the News Feed, Calendar, and new Page Builder. Some of those characters include, curly/smart quotes (“ ”, ‘ ’), the copyright symbol (©), the cent sign (¢), and accented letters (é). ¡Hasta mañana!Posted by Tim Moses at 2:08 pm on 8/19/2009.
Tags: calendar, development, new feature, news feed, page builder, sitemasonThe News Feed and Calendar tools now support RSS artwork with separate cropping choices for RSS and iTunes artwork. Look under Settings -> RSS/Podcast Settings -> Cover Art to upload and crop a picture. This is used for your feeds main image. Images for individual articles have always been supported.
All Sitemason V tools (Calendar, News Feed, and upgraded Page Builder) now support Internet Explorer 8 in the admin area. The list of supported browsers is now current versions of Firefox (Mac, Windows, Linux), Safari (Mac, Windows), Google Chrome (Windows), and Internet Explorer 8 (Windows).
Other fixes:- Upgraded SMV Pages now cache.
- Pictures uploaded through the Custom Form that are automatically added to News Feeds and Calendars now properly support cropping in the picture editor.
- Fixed the Calendar search for "this week" and "last week".
- Nicer print out of dates and times in email from the Date/Time element in Custom Form.
- Security update for the Sign In tool.
Posted by Tim Moses at 11:19 am on 7/23/2009.
Tags: calendar, custom form, development, new feature, news feed, page builder, sign in, sitemasonA majority of clients experienced a website outage Wednesday night from 8:09 pm to 9:40 pm Central Time.
This was due to a lightning strike at one of our numerous server facilities associated with Amazon's Web Services. Even though this is a rare occurrence, we apologize for the down time and inconvenience.
No website data was lost, but it took around an hour and a half to enable replacement servers and transfer data.
Email services were not affected. Some educational clients, including Vanderbilt's Arts and Science department, were also not affected by this outage.
When we can't post system status messages at http://sitemason.com/news, Sitemason posts updates at http://twitter.com/sitemason.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Nathan Baker and we will respond in a timely manner.
Nate Baker
615-301-2600, ext. 135
support@sitemason.comPosted by Sitemason Support at 11:03 pm on 6/10/2009.Emails sent from Sitemason form tools were not delivered from Friday June 5 to Monday June 8.
This is due to a spam blacklisting effort which affected our systems. We apologize for this inconvenience.
All data was stored by our form tools during the outage and can be retrieved. This is because all form data is automatically stored in a form tool's "Manage Data" tab.
Sitemason customers may opt to have email notifications sent to users or themseleves after a form is submitted. These features can be setup and edited in the "Manage Email Settings" tab of a form tool.
If you have email notifications setup for a form, you can check to see if you missed any notifications regarding entries by doing the following:
- Click on the form tool you want to check.
- Click the "Manage Data" tab.
- Click the "View..." button at the bottom of the page.
- In the pop up window, select June 4 to June 9 as your date range and click "Search."
We've worked with our mail provider to ensure checks are being put in place so this issue does not happen again.
A portion of educational clients, including the following, were *NOT* affected by this issue:
- Vanderbilt University
- Martin Methodist University
- Sewanee University
- Trevecca Nazarene University
Nathan Baker
615-301-2600 ext. 135
support@sitemason.comPosted by Sitemason Support at 7:43 pm on 6/8/2009.
We added a lot of new options to the Sign In tool last year, including the ability for a user to change his/her password or email a forgotten password.
Yesterday, we added a "Remember me" option. In the "Customize Behavior" tab, select the amount of time it should remember someone and you're done! The next time one of your users logs in, if they check the "Remember me" checkbox, they won't have to log in again for that amount of time.Posted by Tim Moses at 10:41 am on 3/20/2009.
Tags: development, general, new feature, sign in, sitemasonWe could have announced our new website with a press release and been on our way, but instead we wanted to take the opportunity to show off some of our Sitemason tools. Specifically we'll show you how using the News Feed tool can accomplish varied website functions and features.
Rotating Slider with jQuery and the News Feed
Sliders are becoming somewhat ubiquitous on the web these days. The rotating panels offer a great way of highlighting more than one feature with a little spiffy animation to boot. Most often this is handled by Flash.
Flash is fine, but it usually requires a Flash designer/developer which is the antithesis of our "Take Control of Your Website" mantra. Luckily javascript, and it's popular libraries like jQuery, are proving that you don't need Flash to get great looking animated features on your website.
More importantly, because we can use javascript to do our animations, it makes it really simple to integrate the XML from a News Feed tool with our jQuery scripts to create a really great animated slider. This means that you can add/remove/edit your animated slides just as simply as adding any article to a News Feed.
News Feed as a Blog
Web publishing has long been a staple for the Sitemason CMS, but there are a few features of the News Feed that allow it to be translated easily to a traditional blog. Namely, the tags system and comments.
Tags have become a boon for categorization and relational search, and have become a cornerstone of what moved the web forward to it's current "2.0" monicker. Using tags allows you to quickly and easily find similar postings across multiple categories and listings.
Recently, in addition to its own comments, Sitemason gave its customers the option of integrating third party comment systems Disqus & JS-Kit. This pretty much answers any need anyone would ever have for comments in their website, and makes blogging that much more interesting.
The Sitemason News page uses blog-like formatting in the XSL template to deliver a traditional blog to the new Sitemason web site for delivering our News, Events & Announcements for our customers.
Just a News Feed or a Development Platform?
The flexibility of the News Feed lends it to all sorts of uses. So much so, that it can often be used as it's own development platform. Our new Featured Projects section of our website is a great example of how we can use a standard News Feed tool to develop complex applications for the web.
By combining a customized XSL template with the News Feed and it's tagging system, we've built a Featured Projects application that is just as easy to update as adding an article in Sitemason.
Using the News Feed to tag each project in a new article allows visitors to quickly navigate through our work and look up projects by what Sitemason tools they are using, what industry they're apart of, or by a Sitemason partner's work.
We can then use those tags to parse out the projects in any number of navigational ways such as a drop down menu, alphabetically, or by category (service, industry, tools, etc).
Additional Highlights
Since Sitemason templates are XSL based, they play extremely well with standard HTML/Javascript/CSS, etc. One benefit of this is that it allows integration with third party applications to be seamless. For example, our Sitemason site search is powered by Google Custom Search. Google makes a slew of products that are extremely simple to drop in a standard website, and Sitemason can work with just about all of them.
The ultra-popular micro-blogging tool Twitter also makes javascript embed-able tools that drop right in a Sitemason template. We've made use of one on our home page. If you use Twitter, you should go ahead and follow us so you don't miss out on future announcements and important news... or more often random musings on the web.Posted by Billy White at 6:09 pm on 3/14/2009.
Tags: development, general, new feature, news feed, sitemason, websiteWe had so much fun integrating third party comment systems Disqus & JS-Kit that we decided to make them official features. You can now choose to embed Sitemason comments or alternatively use the Disqus or JS-Kit systems. Simply go to Settings -> Comment Settings in the News Feed to choose your comments that suit you best!
and then choose your preference. Note, if you use Disqus, you have to provide Sitemason with your Disqus username so it can embed the comments properly.
Sitemason now integrates with third party comment applications Disqus & JS-Kit. That means that if you want to trade in the Sitemason built in comment system, for more social-network-y comments, now you can.
If you're not familiar with either of these, Disqus is itself a social network that lets you keep track of your comments on all sorts of websites and blogs around the web from your Disqus account.
JS-Kit is a more agnostic approach letting you login with your Facebook, Yahoo!, OpenID accounts, amongst others. That way users can leave verified comments without needing to create a new account just to leave a comment. JS-Kit also lets you upload images to your comments.
Both integrate a ratings system and allow for threaded commenting as well as guest logins. JS-Kit additionally lets you modify your avatar image. If you're interested, give Sitemason a shout and we'll let you know how it's possible.Site Sharing, the ability to share control of a site with another Sitemason user, has been one of the top requests for Sitemason for a long time. It is now ready and in place.
The new green Shared SiteMuch like tool sharing, you will find a tab in your Site Builders named “Share This Site” where you can choose who to share it with and which tabs of your Site Builder they can see. The shared site will automatically show up in the other users’ Site Managers as a new green Shared Site.
All the pages and tools inside the site are automatically shared as well. If you would like to limit access to individual tools, use the tool’s “Share This Tool” tab to override the site’s share settings.
Instructions can be found in Sharing Control of a Site in the Sitemason User Guide.Posted by Tim Moses at 4:56 pm on 10/27/2008.
Tags: development, new feature, sharing, site builder, site manager, user manager110 30th Ave North, Suite 5 | Nashville, TN 37203 | 615-301-2600 | 888-349-5578