SiteAdmin CMS Pages rendering updates

There are days when there is a silence around, when it seems there nothing to expect from nowhere, but there are moments when out of nowhere something big and noisy comes, TADA! New Pages rendering engine updates got out! Today there are three major updates that can flip your content management and the way you doing things. We kept CMS UI simple as possible with adding maximum things that can do great job for you and today it’s about what else Pages engine can render.

Feeds

Feed Import and linking is back. You can import content into your HTML type page withing CMS from RSS feed you provide. This feature been disabled at some point in SiteAdmin V5 due some technical issues and now we've got it back. Content management never been that easy! You type the URL of the feed, click “Preview” to see it’s content, see if you like it, if you do, hit “Import Feed” button and you will see this feed content within your HTML editor as if you typed whole thing yourself.

Hey, one more thing was brought back: using RSS feeds as page content. You can run portal pages or whole sites just out of somebody's RSS feeds, they will maintain your content ;) All you need to do is just to specify URL of the feed as your content source.

Wiki

Oh, that’s something new. It's official now, SiteAdmin CMS got support for WIKI syntax, you can see sample page at http://skitsanos.com/content/wiki-syntax-support.aspx and it's wiki source via http://skitsanos.com/content/wiki-syntax-support.aspx?mode=plain

Following is the tiny cheat-sheet about what’s supported in WIKI type of Pages:

So now when you click on “Create Page” you have at least four options to choose from:

1. Create HTML Page (that’s what you had for a long time)
2. Create Page with WIKI markup
3. Import RSS Feed to a HTML Page
4. Use RSS feed as your page.

What’s next?

Maybe custom markup?

Well, we wanted to keep quiet about it, but hey, why not mention one more exciting thing we are working on – runtime widget rendering. Within couple of month there was some research work going on on ASP.NET and, surprise, PHP platforms to see if we can have some sort of custom markup, let’s call it (widgets markup language for the moment - wiml) to be brought to use as placeholders for some sort of widgets, so when i type something like:

<wiml:calendar id=’cal1’ />

it will render into complete HTML and JavaScript code block and you will be able to manipulate it with JavaScript.

Won’t get into deep details for the moment, because it’s still in early local testing stage where we have dozens of options how to do things, kind of reminds me the story about Microsoft Ribbon UI control development…

Or, maybe, FTP to VFS?

Another interesting thing could be is to allow access to SiteAdmin CMS Virtual File System via FTP. So all content management modules can be navigated with FTP client and treated as files. This will help a lot Private Label providers that use SiteAdmin CMS and would like to provide their clients additional functionality, like content backup for example.

Oh, what about new content store?

As you know for the moment SiteAdmin CMS using XML side of Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 (including Express Edition) to host content meta models. This can be changed as well when WDK9 will be out, very possible, finally, it will run on native XML DB storage, something more productive than it was in 2003 if any of you still using CMS made on WDK5-Berkeley. New storage won’t have that much server loading and will use native to XML queries, so we are expecting quite a boost in performance with lesser use of resources.

That’s it for today, now you can post some comments;)

One click file upload with BrowserPlus

While looking through Yahoo BrowserPlus you can be a bit disappointed with lack of simple examples that explains you really simple things, one of them was like how the heck you can just call file browse dialog and upload selected file, so here we go.

In my case I use jQuery in most of the projects, so I start with the known things to handle my click on some link (I have id id btnUpload):

$(‘#btnUpload’).click(function() {});

Now, piece of code that will popup File Browse dialog:

var $BP = BrowserPlus;

$BP.FileBrowse.OpenBrowseDialog({}, function(e) {});

BrowserPlus allows you to select one or more files, so as result of execution it returns you an array of files selected. In my case I need to have only one file selected and uploaded. Uploading in Browser plus done in following way:

$BP.Uploader.upload({
     url: '/upload.aspx',
     files: { file: my_file },
     progressCallback: function(r) { console.log(r); },
     responseProgressCallback: function(r) { console.log(r); }
   }, function(res) { console.log(res); });

Where my_file in this case will be a reference to what I receive from File Browse dialog. So after I wrap all things together we will have following code snippet:

$(‘#btnUpload’).click(function() {
$BP.FileBrowse.OpenBrowseDialog({
$BP.Uploader.upload({
     url: '/upload.aspx',
     files: { file: e.value[0] },
     progressCallback: function(r) { console.log(r); },
     responseProgressCallback: function(r) { console.log(r); }
   }, function(res) { console.log(res); });
}, function(e) {});
});

console.log() I used just to see BrowserPlus uploading progress status in Firebug, plug-in for Firefox.

Hope this will help you as well.