Santa Clara University

If you're using the survey, blog, event rsvp, simple form, or other elements that permit users to submit form data, you may notice a change in the appearance of the 'captcha' image - that's the image with random text that we use to ensure that the form is not submitted via an automated process.  The new image and its related validation routine have enhanced security, compared to the original version.

When uploading an image file to Commonspot, try to avoid file names that include characters such as accents, apostrophe, and commas.  Commonspot won't provide a warning about the file name (that should be fixed in the next release), but it will cause problems in the replication process.  If you rename the file on your local system prior to uploading it, removing any non-standard characters, that will avoid the replication problems.

The Profile element, and a few others in Commonspot, allow you to re-use existing content in other pages by selecting data with a custom filter.  Find out more about using filters to select data for display in this overview and tutorial.

The database server used by Commonspot is scheduled to be upgraded on Thursday morning (3/25/10), beginning at 6 am.  During the upgrade, Commonspot pages that rely on dynamically-generated content from the database will not be displayed.  We expect that the upgrade process will take less than an hour.

We've removed access to the Profile Element temporarily - this element contributed to the cms server problems we experienced this week.  We will be working with this element early next week, and expect to have access to it restored fairly soon, although it may be a few days.  Please contact Russ or Brian if you have questions or concerns about this change.

We've been able to resolve the Commonspot authoring and replication issues - replication just ran, so anything published on cms between 3:15 yesterday and 2:15 today should now be represented on www.scu.edu.

The text formatting options normally available in the Commonspot text editor's Style menu are missing if you're using Firefox - they do appear for IE8.  A set of patches released today by Paperthin fixes this problem - we've installed those on the development server, and will schedule these to be applied on the cms server on Monday, 3/8.

We have a new element available that presents a form allowing users to subscribe to receive email notifications when a blog or RSS feed is updated.  This uses Feedburner on the back end to handle the subscriptions and sending email.  Read more about this on the Web Publishing site.

The CSS menu in Commonspot's text editor is not including text formatting styles, following the recent patch installation.  We're working on a resolution to this, but in the interim you can use IE7 or IE8 to access the CSS menu.

The formatted text editor used in various applications (blog, event calendar, survey, others) was not fully functional in Firefox 3.6 - content was only editable in plain-text format.  This has been resolved as of  2/17 at 10am on the cms server, and the update will be applied on the www servers in about 30 minutes.