Santa Clara University

We're planning an application server upgrade on the cms server on Thursday (10/1) morning.  The upgrade is scheduled to start at 8am and should be completed by mid-morning, Authoring access will be unavailable during the upgrade.  Sorry for the short notice on this system upgrade - the new version of the application server should improve the performance and server stabiity issues we've been seeing in recent weeks.

We're working on a prototype for a version of the SCU web site optimized for mobile devices. You can read more about this project and view the mobile site in development at scu.edu/webpublishing/mobile .

We've assembled an online survey of mobile Web use, intended to gather information about how people at SCU use Web access via mobile devices.  If you're using the mobile Web, you're invited to take the survey.

In yesterday's Commonspot Site Administrator meeting, a request was made for a printed user guide for the CMS.  There is Commonspot Contributor Guide (PDF) available - it's a lengthy document, and since the CMS system is updated with some regularity it wouldn't be recommended to print the entire publication, since some of the material will become out of date with future system upgrades.

The rich text editor includes a menu of CSS styles that can be applied to headings, paragraphs, lists and tables.  If you don't see anything in the CSS menu when editing a page, here's how to correct that:

• Open the page (or subsite template) in Author mode.
• Click "Style Sheets" in the Properties & Actions menu.
• Select "Use Style Sheet..."

No changes are necessary in the next form, just click Finish to apply the change.

Following the Commonspot 5 upgrade, many people have noticed that the Template Gallery doesn't include their own subsite templates.  This problem can be corrected by updating the security settings for your template.  Here's how to do that:

• Open the template in Author mode (you can find the template by selecting from the template hierarchy list in a template-based page).
• Select "Template Security" from the Properties & Actions menu.
• Click "add a new group" and select Authenticated Users from the group list.
• Give this group the "Read" permission, and save that change.

The rich text editor element in Commonspot 5 includes a few changes in the way we access the HTML source, along with new options for applying formatting to text via an HTML property inspector, and through an improved Word/markup cleanup utility.

If you're checking the "referring pages" list in the Tools & Information menu or the Subsite Admin page reports, be advised that the lists of pages are not complete.  Any link reference established before the upgrade to Commonspot 5, and not updated since that date, will not appear in these lists.  We're working on fixing this issue, but for now the referring pages lists are not reliable.

Commonspot 5 includes an image editing utility, accessible via the Image Gallery.  Use the image editor to resize images, create thumnails, and modify the image position, alignment, brightness and contrast.

You can speed up the process of logging in to Commonspot by un-checking the "Show Pending Actions" box in the login form.  This is checked by default, and will generate a list of pages waiting for approval, work-in-progress, and broken link reports.  If you're just logging in for a quick page edit, you can bypass these reports and save some processing time for Commonspot by unchecking that box when you log in.