Santa Clara University

Add a Facebook "share" button to any Commonspot page.  You'll find this new element in the Page Tools section of the Element Gallery.

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with some regularity it wouldn't be recommended to print the entire publication, since some of the material will become out of date with future system upgrades.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 was upgraded to version 5 this morning.  If you haven't yet seen the overview of Commonspot 5 in the Web Publishing site, you might want to review that - there are some user-interface changes for authoring.

When using the Media Player element to embed a SWF video in a Commonspot page, you can optionally set the "controller" script parameter to "true" to display the play/pause/volume controls.  The control bar is always displayed for FLV video, but is not shown by default for SWF files.

The new Blog Manager system is now active.  If you maintain blog content in Commonspot, you will now need to login to the Blog Manager to add blog posts, or edit previous posts.  If you have questions about this change, or need assistance with the new system, please send a Support Request to the OMC/Media Services Web Publishing team.  

The Media Player element now supports an additional custom script parameter - "preview" - the URL path to a preview image to be displayed in the video player window.