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SITEMASON NEWS
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Until recently, if another Sitemason user shared control of a tool with you, you wouldn’t know it unless you clicked the “Add a shared tool” icon in the Site Manager. Now, shared tools automatically show up in your Site Manager in new pink shared tool groups.
To use a shared tool, click on the tool and move it to an existing site or tool group. Full instructions for sharing tools can be found Sharing Control of Pages in the Sitemason User Guide.
The new pink Shared Tool GroupPosted by Tim Moses at 4:44 pm on 10/27/2008.
Tags: calendar, custom form, development, news feed, news publisher, page builder, photo gallery, sharing, user managerThanks to being involved at Nashville Startup Weekend, I have a plethora of like-minded Nashville business folks to “tweet” with from the Sitemason Twitter account now! What a lovely sight.
"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length," according to Wikipedia.
Thanks Jamie for taking this photo! I wore a tie the first day, and it was downhill from there.
Now I don’t have to have long conversation with myself from @nathantbaker and @sitemason, which was getting awkward. Our company twitter account is still new… And now work just got even better.
If you don’t have an account, try it out and follow us at twitter.com/sitemason!
Here’s a brief recap of what I was involved withand here are photos from various members of Nashville Startup Weekend.
It was great to network with other fine business, marketing and technology folks in Nashville. Check out recaps of the conference to learn more about what was coined a “symphony of chaos.”
This was the first Startup Weekend in Nashville and I’m both proud and humbled to know Sitemason played a part in supporting entrepreneurship in such an innovative forum.
Go Nashville!Posted by Nathan Baker at 12:16 am on 10/13/2008.
Tags: business, cms, entrepreneur, general, nashville, nsw08, sitemason, websiteNo doubt if you’ve used any online application recently you’ve noticed that it’s tags, tags everywhere. They prove immensely beneficial for searching, categorizing and grouping. The next iteration of our publishing tool, the News Feed Tool, employs tags for these same reasons. People who are used to tagging their pictures on Flickr or videos on YouTube will find familiar benefits for using tags to unleash a new world of organization for their news articles.
One of the less obvious benefits of tags are how they affect the front end development of a new web project. Complex website functions like pulling a list of related articles or specific event dates depending on which page you have landed on, is generally a task for heavy lifting scripting languages like PHP or PERL. An example might be this:
A record label has a number or signed artists, they also have a number of releases that may or may not be from a current artist. In addition, each of their current artists has a list of tour dates and also merchandise items. The challenge is to pull all of those items, where the content that is displayed is solely dependent on what artist a visitor is viewing… and do so without having to duplicate any content entries in the CMS.
Sounds expensive, huh? Not so. By using tags in the development of a site template, Sitemason can effectively slash the cost of a complex requirement like the example above. This means that small businesses with a limited budget for their website project can employ an extremely simple solution to tackle very complex tasks. What’s even better, since the template is a one time front end cost, there is no affect on the monthly pricing. Recent quotes for similar flexibility have been decreased by as much as 75% by using the News Feed & Tags making Sitemason even more affordable for users with intricate requirements for their website.I just tested pulling a published Google Docs Document into a Sitemason website using the Web Proxy tool (
). It works pretty well, except for the links Google adds to the bottom of the page. The link to Google Docs and the link to let you edit the page will not work. Here is the example…http://developer.sitemason.com/google_docs
The new beta Web Proxy tool (
) is turning out to be very useful. It allows you to pull HTML content from other sources into your website so that it will appear with inside your Sitemason template with your Sitemason navigation. This can very useful in two different situations.- Local PHP apps - Normally, if you have installed or written PHP content for your site, you have to duplicate your site’s look and navigation with your PHP app. Instead, you can do a minimal amount of formatting for your PHP app and let the web proxy tool serve out your PHP app, encapsulating it in your Sitemason website.
- External websites - If you use a separate web service to handle a blog, an Amazon store, or other content for your website, you have three problems. The content doesn’t show up under your domain, it usually doesn’t match the look of your website, and it has entirely separate navigation. With the web proxy tool, Sitemason will grab the content from the external site on the fly and server it up as if it is a part of your website. Your content shows up inside your Sitemason template, using your Sitemason navigation, under your domain.
There isn’t a hotter term of the moment right now than SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. If you are unfamiliar with the term, SEO is just a set of “best practices” to get your site to play nice with search engines (read “Google”). The idea is to get your website ranked on that oh-so-coveted first page of rankings.
There are entire companies devoted to SEO that can all but guarantee a top ranking for you. However, you’ll find that the basics of SEO are something you can easily employ on your own. Here is a list of a few things you can do to tackle that SEO itch so you can brag about your site being, like, totally optimized.
- Links - There really is no secret to this one, but it’s generally underrated how important it actually is. Google has made a gazillion dollars by being the first to give weight to links from other sites. The idea is that the only way to count “votes” for a sites popularity is if a site is linked from somewhere else. The assumption is that you would only link to another site if you wanted somebody to click that link because there’s something interesting behind it. So the good and bad news is that all you have to do is get your site linked in thousands of places to be popular. Easy if you, say, are breaking the news that Brittney is getting back together with K.Fed. A little more nuanced if you’re actually trying to get your brand out there.
- Text Based Navigation and Content - This may sound obvious, but if search engines can’t see your text, you’re hosed. This comes into play when you’re planning your redesign and just absolutely cannot do without your site having all sorts of animation and slick transitions and fancy rollover tricks. These look great, and everyone loves them, but with current technologies there isn’t a way to do this without Flash or equivalent. And why is that a bad thing? It’s not if you don’t care about search engines, but if you do, then there’s some bad news for Flash fans… for the most part, whatever is done in Flash is completely invisible to search engines. Same goes for image based navigation.
- Meta Tags - Remember 1997? Yeah, well so do search engines, and just like you’re not the same person you were a decade ago, neither are they. Meta tags are still very important for descriptions. That’s the little block of info that appears beneath your title in rankings. Keywords are definitely still necessary to help search engines figure out what you’re hocking, but their importance for rankings are greatly diminished.
The Commerce tool lets you generate custom reports tailored to what different people in your organization may need. The only problem is you would still have to get the reports out of the Commerce tool yourself since there was no sharing.
We recently added an option to share each custom report with a group of users. Now you can make a shipping report and the person doing the fulfillment can get the report herself without seeing any credit card information. You get the idea.
To share a report, create an editor group in your User Manager for each group of Sitemason users who will share a report. In the Commerce tool, edit an existing report or create a new one from the “Manage Data” tab. You will see a new menu called “Share this report with…”. Just select the group of users who should be able to see this report and save the report.On their end, they will see your Commerce tool in a pink Shared Tool group in their Site Manager. Once they move to a site or tool group, they will only see the Setup and Manage Data tabs and on the Manage Data tab, they will only have the option to export the report you shared.
I just updated the FCKeditor from version 2.6.1 to 2.6.3. What prompted me was a bug reported on Vanderbilt in the calendar. If you added an HTML comment in source view in the FCKeditor, you would not be able to open that event again. The window would come up and you could see the event in the background, but the window remained dim because the FCKeditor produced a Javascript error that halted the process of opening the window.
If you look at the help button, it still says 2.6.1. I guess they forgot to update that. Other fixes in the editor include undoing after spellchecking. The full list is on the What’s New page on the FCKeditor website.Posted by Tim Moses at 1:18 pm on 8/29/2008.
Tags: calendar, custom form, development, editor, news feed, news publisher, page builderSitemason welcomes two new organizations to the family: Christ Church Cathedral and Gallatin Public Affairs.
Christ Church Cathedral
Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville, Tennessee is a spiritual home for more than two thousand men, women and children. The Cathedral plays an active role in the lives of its members, its community, its diocese and the world at large.
Gallatin Public Affairs
For nearly 20 years, at the often complex intersection of business, government, politics and the media, Gallatin Public Affairs has helped its clients seize opportunities, overcome challenges and grow. They are strategists, lobbyists, communicators, researchers and organizers - experienced Democratic and Republican professionals who help you succeed. They have offices in Seattle, Spokane, Helena, Portland, Boise and Washington, DC.
110 30th Ave North, Suite 5 | Nashville, TN 37203 | 615-301-2600 | 888-349-5578