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:

1. Click on the form tool you want to check.
2. Click the "Manage Data" tab.
3. Click the "View..." button at the bottom of the page.
4. In the pop up window, select June 4 to June 9 as your date range and click "Search."

Any entries collected by the form during the outage will appear in your window. If the search returns no records, then you did not miss any emails from the form during the outage.

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* effected by this issue:

• Vanderbilt University
• Martin Methodist University
• Sewanee University
• Trevecca Nazarene University

If you have any questions about this issue or want help retrieving your data, please contact Nathan Baker for assistance.

Nathan Baker
615-301-2600 ext. 135
support@sitemason.com

We 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.

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.

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.

No 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.