Eric's dashboard

Eric posted an update in Sitemasher on September 28, 2009 21:10:

Sitemasher moving to private label, reseller model

Sitemasher will no longer be sold directly to end-users. It will only be available to private label resellers. As such, the resellers will provide support to their end users under their brand - and Sitemasher will support the resellers. If you would like to be put in touch with a Sitemasher reseller, please contact sales@sitemasher.com

Eric set one of Eric's replies as an official response to "How do I set users' passwords?" in Sitemasher

Eric replied on August 15, 2009 18:08 to the question "How do I set users' passwords?" in Sitemasher:

Hi hr,

Unfortunately there is no bulk upload for site user accounts, You have to create them in the user management workspace manually or put a create user account object on one of your published pages to allow your site users to create their own accounts.

Either way, when a site user account is first created, an email containing a temporary password will be sent to the person that created the account. I.e., You do not set the initial password, the system does this for you and emails it out. If you create accounts for other users, you will have to forward the email containing the temporary password to them.

Hope that helped.

Eric

Eric replied on August 11, 2009 15:41 to the question "Relational data support?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Mark,

Yes, you can relate tables (we call them lists) in Sitemasher. However, the ability to do this is still in beta so you may have to put up with some issues along the way. The feature to do this (foreign keys) should be out of beta by the end of August.

To create data list relationships:
1) Activate the beta features by clicking the "Turn Beta Features On" menu in the top right corner of Sitemasher Studio

2) In the Lists Workspace, select the list that you would like to reference from another list (the 'child' in your terms) and choose which field you would like to display to the parent list by setting the "Display Column" property of the list in the Right Hand Side (RHS) property panel.

3) In the Lists Workspace, select the referring (or parent in your terms) list, click on "Fields View", then "New" to add a new field. Select a field type of "Foreign Key". (A foreign key is simply a pointer to a unique record (or private key) in another table/list)

4) Select the foreign key field in the fields view created in Step 3 and choose the list you would like it to refer to by setting the "DataGroupID" property on the RHS to the name of the list you would like to point to.

As mentioned above, this is still in beta. When fully released, these features will be easier to use. However, even in their current state, foreign key relationships allow you to build custom data-driven applications with Sitemasher. Stay tuned for more data services features coming soon.

I hope this helped. Feel free to email support@sitemasher.com for more information or to provide feedback on your use of Sitemasher. We'd love to hear from you.

Eric

Eric replied on June 18, 2009 18:16 to the question "Backend translaction" in Sitemasher:

Hi Giorgio,

Support for other languages in Sitemasher is possible and planned - but we will be focusing on English for the time being. For clarification, would you require both the site building and content editing tools in Italian? Or is it acceptable to build the site using our English page builder (or you own HTML/CSS editing tools) but allow your clients/content editors to edit content in Italian?

Regards

Eric replied on June 14, 2009 01:09 to the question "Price for new data services features" in Sitemasher:

Yes, data services will be ready in about a week - we are in the final testing process now - and there is no extra cost for them at this time. I.e., You would be able to use them as part of our existing $US39/user/month subscription price. We may charge extra for data services in the future, but anyone who is a subscriber before that will be able to continue to use them at no extra charge for the lifetime of their subscription.

And yes - you can sign up now to begin building your site and add your data features when support for them becomes available.

Eric replied on June 13, 2009 17:22 to the question "Can I do this with Sitemasher????????" in Sitemasher:

Hi Leah,

YES, you will be able to this with Sitemasher in about one week as we are about to unveil our new data services features which will include custom data lists and filters (queries) - as well as other features for easily building dynamic, data-driven websites.

The high level steps to achieve what you want would be:

1. Create a custom list that has the people to be searched (include fields name, location, picture - and any others you need)

2. Create a page with a form that has an input field where your site visitors would type in their location (zip or postal code)

3. Create a filter that takes the location entered in (2) and passes it to a (free) web-based mapping service like Microsoft Virtual Earth or Google Maps. The results will be displayed on your page using pushpins. You can set the map up to only display results within 15km of the user-entered location. When your site visitor clicks on a pushpin they could see more details.

4. Create a member area and secure the page in step#2 so that only users that have created an account and logged in to your site can access the page created in (2).

5. Publish your site. That's it.

If you are interested in proceeding with this approach - or have other questions, please Email support@sitemasher.com and we would be happy to help you with the details needed to get this to work.

Eric replied on April 21, 2009 21:42 to the question "shopping carts???" in Sitemasher:

Hi Steve,

We are planning on adding a native shopping cart feature to Sitemasher - but it is not available yet. What we recommend in the mean time is to use an online eCommerce service like 3Dcart, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, etc for the online shopping page(s) on your site and Sitemasher for all your other site pages.

Regards,
Eric

Eric set one of David's replies as an official response to "cannot change link styling in html editor" in Sitemasher

Eric replied on March 03, 2009 03:29 to the idea "Add a Data Grid object" in Sitemasher:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the idea...stay tuned :)

Eric replied on March 02, 2009 21:42 to the question "Can I use FTP?" in Sitemasher:

Hello Heath,

We will not be providing FTP access per se to our servers. (It is not secure) However, we are planning to add "target folder" support to our file import/upload wizard soon. I.e. You will be able to place your assets in the folder structure you would like on your local machine, then place them all (with folder structure) in a zip file and we will automatically create the corresponding folder structure (and files) in your asset library (I.e., the "target") when we import the zip file.

Hope this will help. Let us know if you were looking for something different.

Regards,

Eric

Eric set one of Eric's replies as an official response to "Article nav and viewing" in Sitemasher

Eric replied on February 21, 2009 17:48 to the question "Article nav and viewing" in Sitemasher:

Hi Andrew,

If I understand what you are trying to do, you could try tying your list navigation object to a list viewer, not an article viewer. The reason is that the former can display a number of articles but an article viewer is for displaying the contents of a single article only. Normally when someone clicks on a tag cloud, multiple articles (a list) are displayed - hence the need for the list viewer. To do this easily, drop a list navigation object on the page, tie it to your list source, and select the "automatically create list viewer" option.

To see the purpose and relationship between these object types, check out the "Articles Overview" topic within this help section:

http://dashboard.sitemasher.com/help

Hope that helps.

Eric replied on February 20, 2009 18:37 to the question "Error adding master page" in Sitemasher:

In that case, we will try to find a way to repair your page for you. I will email you with the details. Sorry for the troubles.

Eric

A comment on the question "Error adding master page" in Sitemasher:

Hi Colin - I'm thinking maybe we ARE that good :) We've got a fix for the problem and it will be deployed in our next update. Until then, you can work around it by deleting the page that contained the offending table element. We're pretty sure the problem occurs when you copy/paste cells within a table. – Eric, on February 20, 2009 18:23

Eric set one of Eric's replies as an official response to "Error adding master page" in Sitemasher

Eric replied on February 20, 2009 16:32 to the question "Error adding master page" in Sitemasher:

Looks like you've found a bug - we'll fix that one ASAP. In case you are wondering, this type of error would not affect any published sites as they are isolated from the editing environment and hosted by a fully redundant hardware and software system.

Eric replied on February 19, 2009 22:37 to the question "$39 or $3,900?" in Sitemasher:

Yes, the term "user" can be interpreted multiple ways. With Sitemasher you only pay for users of the site management platform. So, in your example the cost would only be $39.

Eric replied on February 11, 2009 21:28 to the question "Will Sitemasher allow php scripts and custom backend for a flash application?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Anders,

The short answer is no - we don’t support php/custom backend code running on our servers. However, you can store text files on our server (in your site's asset library) that your flash objects can read. Also, we will be releasing member-only areas in about one month that will allow you to restrict certain pages/content to logged in users only.

Hope that helped.

Regards,

Eric Dorgelo,
VP, Product Development
Sitemasher

Eric replied on December 20, 2008 06:25 to the question "How to delete an article list?" in Sitemasher:

The new code is almost ready. If we don't find any showstoppers in final testing, it should be available before Wed, Dec 24 - I'm thinking we should call it our holiday release :) Lot's of new features and improvements in it.