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.

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.

The 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.

These changes are currently deployed to Sitemason's servers. The updates will make it out to enterprise customers over the next couple of weeks.      

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* affected 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.