Web Content Management

Finally Looked at RadEditor…

Andy Burns, , 1 Comment

Another thing on my long list of ‘things to do’ was have a look at the RadEditor control. Well, one of the guys at the SUGUK meeting last week finally gave me an excuse – he told me that it would detect if MS Word Formatted text was being pasted into it. Now that would be cool; all our customers have problems with users pasting Word formatted text directly into MOSS. Hell, we even had this problem with MCMS – some users insisted on writing every in Word, and copying and pasting text across

So although I might be the last dev on earth to do so, I thought I’d take a look. And I was impressed. Continue reading “Finally Looked at RadEditor…” →

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Finally Looked at RadEditor…

Plan Your Publishing Pages

Andy Burns, , , , , Leave a comment

I was reading Andrew Connell’s book ‘SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management‘ and it made something crystallize for me. I’ve been pondering this for about 8 months or so, but I believe that several of our customers are using the Publishing features of MOSS incorrectly, and that simply basing sites on out-of-box Collaboration and Publishing site templates is a mistake.

(Well, at least without additional planning) Continue reading “Plan Your Publishing Pages” →

Plan Your Publishing Pages

"How to Optimize SharePoint WCM for Performance"

Andy Burns, , , 1 Comment

Really, this is just a link to the MSDN article “How to Optimize a SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Site for Performance“. Nice easy title.

It does mention a particular irritation of mine – that many (most?) systems don’t use any kind of compression on static content. I remember seeing Apache admins complaining about people not using compression, oh, 10 years ago. In SharePoint, this is such a waste! JavaScript and CSS files are lovely and compressible – and core.js is big. So is Core.css. Doesn’t seem much reason not to enable it!

To do so, open IIS Manager, and right click on the ‘Web Sites’ folder. Select the service tab, and check the check box. Don’t go for dynamic compression; this would be a bad idea.

iis-compression

You’ll also want to check/edit the file types compressed. See Using HTTP Compression for details, and you’ll probably need to add the .JS and .CSS extensions.

I must sit down and give this a proper test some time. Certainly I don’t see the same sizes in the article, but then I’m looking at the file sizes on disc; in 12 Hive, and in the temporary compression cache (typically %WinDir%/IIS Temprorary Compressed Files). My numbers show Core.js to be 575Kb uncompressed, 91Kb after compression. Nice!

"How to Optimize SharePoint WCM for Performance"

Page hit counter in MOSS

Andy Burns, , , , 8 Comments

So, a customer of ours is upgrading to SharePoint 2007. One of the things they were looking for is a hit counter, so they can see the number of times a page was requested. This was easy for them to do in SharePoint 2003 – they’d just use FrontPage, and insert a Hit Counter web component. I’d never heard of such a thing build into 2007, but over morning coffee, I decided to give it a try. Much to my surprise, it works… …sort of.

There is a hit counter (albeit with an awful set of styles). It does work too:

Hit counter in SharePoint

That’s one of the better styles, believe it or not. So, what’s the problem with this?

Well, in normal pages, nothing. It counts; ’nuff said. However, publishing pages are a bit different. They store metadata in a ‘Page Content Type‘ and then use Page Layouts to render that data. What this means is that many things that appear to the user as separate pages actually use just one ASPX file for rendering their content – and this is where the hit counter doesn’t work. It counts the number of hits on the ASPX page – so instead of getting a number of hits on that page of content, you get the number of hits on content using that page layout. Which sucks a bit.

I’ll look into this a bit more soon, and see what I find. It can’t be that hard – apart from the whole ‘Page Layout’ thing, it’s not exactly rocket science.

Page hit counter in MOSS

SUGUK Meeting: WCM Best Practices

Andy Burns, , 6 Comments

So, I went to the SUGUK meeting last week on the 16th at LBi’s Truman Brewery building on Brick lane. I was looking forward to it, though was disappointed to find that the brewery is now offices. Anyway,the subject was WCM best practices with Chris O’Brien and Riaz Ahmed, who’re always entertaining speakers. Continue reading “SUGUK Meeting: WCM Best Practices” →

SUGUK Meeting: WCM Best Practices

What's wrong with Scunthorpe?

Andy Burns, , Leave a comment

A requirement that I’ve seen appear a few times recently is for:

Automatic filtering of content that is deemed to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable is filtered.

Yes, we all love a good jolt of lawyerspeak that is completely unconnected with what is possible for a computer to do ‘automatically’. I mean, let’s ignore that the court cases for what counts as, well, any of those things can be less than clear cut – if they were, cases would be short, and lawyers would earn less.

(As it happens, I am legally an ethnic minority in England – which I object to!)

Anyway, obviously complex decisions that require the judgement of human intelligence (let alone Judges) are beyond the wit of a computer program – hell, if it can’t find my printer, how’ll it find a bit of text ‘defamatory’? Continue reading “What's wrong with Scunthorpe?” →

What's wrong with Scunthorpe?

SharePoint Licensing

Andy Burns, , , Leave a comment

Found on Cornelius Van Dyk’s blog – SharePoint Licensing Information. Interesting stuff. No, wait, the other thing – tedious. Still, quite how you license your Internet facing WCM site did strike me as an interesting issue, especially as one of my colleagues kept going on about having external sites as ‘read only’. What, no feedback forms? Comments? Survey submissions? Well, it seems that the definition is one of accessibility – so long as everyone can access these features, you can use an Internet access license. I wondered how they’d deal with that.

(For content accessible to employees/partners only, I presume it’d be a normal client access license).

Update: See the Logical Architecture Model: Corporate Deployment document for details on this, and dealing with partners. That’s quite interesting – you can host partners sites on Internet or Intranet farms.

SharePoint Licensing