Sitemason
Build on us
SITEMASON BLOG
-
Sitemason's new PHP template library is slowly growing and we wanted to outline a few favorites. Visit our Developer website to learn more.
printNavAsList
One of the most oft-requested and certainly the most helpful methods is the new printNavAsList(); This single call publishes all of the menu items for a site as unordered lists, including nested if more than one level of navigation exists.
For example, for a site with two levels of navigation, using this call with the parameter to display all navigation items:
$content->printNavAsList(array('display_all' => 1));
Will output those navigation items as an HTML nested unordered list:
<div class="sm_nav">
<ul class="l1">
<li class="current"><a href="home" class="current">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="blog">Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="about">About Us</a>
<ul class="l2">
<li><a href="about/overview">Company Overview</a></li>
<li><a href="about/history">Our History</a></li>
<li><a href="about/staff">Our Staff</a></li>
<li><a href="about/contact">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="links">links</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
Some other parameters for printNavAsList let you declare a maximum or minimum number of levels to display, or even to skip the first item in navigation altogether (often useful for landing pages you don't want to appear in the navigation).
printTagCloud
Tag Clouds are always fun, and now Sitemason allows you to create one in a single line. It outputs the cloud within an HTML class and gives it a specific font-size relative to the other tags in the cloud.
<div class="sm_tag_cloud">
<h3>TAG CLOUD</h3>
<p>
<a style="font-size: 18px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Article" title="Article">Article</a>
<a style="font-size: 10px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Interview" title="Interview">Interview</a>
<a style="font-size: 10px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Tutorial" title="Tutorial">Tutorial</a>
<a style="font-size: 10px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Community" title="Community">Community</a>
<a style="font-size: 10px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Education" title="Education">Education</a>
<a style="font-size: 14px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Relief" title="Relief">Relief</a>
<a style="font-size: 10px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Support" title="Support">Support</a>
<a style="font-size: 18px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=Volunteering" title="Volunteering">Volunteering</a>
<a style="font-size: 10px" class="tag_cloud" href="tag_cloud?xtags=WRAP" title="WRAP">WRAP</a>
</p>
</div>
printPageHead
Take all of the work out of editing the <head> of a template, and add this simple line. It uses the Sitemason shared template to populate the title, meta descriptions & keywords, as well as shared javascript and style sheets.Webkit is the open source browser engine behind Safari, Google Chrome, Apple Mail, the iPhone, Google Android, Palm Pre, and possibly new Blackberries. The latest version of Webkit is available as a special version of Safari at webkit.org. Aside from just being able to try out the very latest features, like CSS masks, CSS transitions and animation, CSS 3D transforms, and WebGL, the Webkit Inspector has become one of the slickest and best tools for web developers for debugging HTML, CSS, and Javascript. As of yesterday, it just got even better. You can read the full posting about it, which is pretty long, or use the links below to jump to the section you're interested in.
With the new Webkit Inspector, it is a whole lot easier to edit HTML, CSS, and colors on the fly and see immediate results. If you ever do anything advanced with Javascript, the new event listener section, improved breakpoints, and AJAX debugger are invaluable. There are other minor updates, like syntax coloring on CSS and embedded Javascript and CSS; it only did HTML and standalone Javascript before. The resource loading timeline and console have also been improved.Tim Moses, one of the founders of Sitemason, spoke at the Nashville Mac Users webSIG on Sunday. Topics ranged from what it takes for a graphic designer to get started producing websites to how a content management system makes managing web sites easier to how web servers work.
Sitemason is proudly sponsoring BarCamp Nashville this Saturday. BarCamp is a digital and technical community that has roots in many major cities across the United States.
The free conference includes a series of speaking sessions from community members and local tech professionals on a variety of topics.
Based on working daily with website managers from Nashville and beyond, Director of Technical Support, Nate Baker, will share some of the most common and global issues people have with updating their website or blog in the the following session:
CMS 101 - Tips and FAQs on using your "content management system" to update your website or blog.
Sign up for free for this session if you want to brush up on your website editing skills in a workshop atmosphere.After an overview of CMS and common issues, you'll have a chance to ask Nate and/or the audience specific questions about updating your website or blog with your CMS.
If you have the opportunity to make it out, we hope to see you at our session and at many of the other free sessions available.
BarCamp Nashville begins 8:00 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, at Cadillac Ranch in downtown Nashville and is free to the public.
We hope to see you there!Posted by Sitemason Support at 5:22 pm on 10/14/2009.Sitemason just announced their beta group for the new and highly anticipated PHP Templates. That means anyone who knows the least bit of PHP can develop their own custom Sitemason template. If you are interested in testing out PHP Templates, please contact developer-group@sitemason.com. We have lots of resources on our Developer website, which brings us to our second announcement.
Sitemason Developers Group and website just launched!
developer.sitemason.com
Our new developers website has lots of resources for those who want to go beyond the user tools, and get into the nitty gritty details of template development and custom sites. Sitemason PHP Templates are exceptionally simple, and anyone with just a little bit of programming knowledge can whip out a template in no time.
If you want to participate, join the Sitemason Developers Google Group.The new Page Builder 5 just got a bunch of new features. It is close to going live and becoming the default version.
- move - You can now move pages between sites and site sections. Look for "Move..." under the Page menu.
- transfer - You can transfer pages to other Sitemason users. Look for "Transfer..." under the Page menu.
- revert - You can replace your draft version of a page with the current live version. Look for "Revert..." under the Page menu.
- auto-save - The Page Builder automatically saves your draft version periodically as you work. To make your draft version live, click "Save" instead of "Save as Draft".
- activity indicator - There is a spinning indicator and message next to the Save buttons to tell you when the Page Builder is saving or reverting.
- new save buttons - The "Save" and "Save as Draft" buttons have been moved from the bottom of the window to the right side of the title bar. Hopefully, this will be a more convenient location.
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 6/10/2009.110 30th Ave North, Suite 5 | Nashville, TN 37203 | 615-301-2600 | 888-349-5578