Eric L's dashboard

Eric L replied on December 08, 2008 19:31 to the problem "html editor has formatting problems with tables" in Sitemasher:

Hi Ray,

Regarding your first problem of only having the border applied to the outside, apparently this issue persist outside of Sitemasher and to get around it, you can use only CSS to style your entire table.

First create a class, say .test.
Then, create the following selectors.

.test { }

table.test {
border-top: 1px solid green;
border-left: 1px solid green;
}

table.test td {
border-bottom: 1px solid green;
border-right: 1px solid green;
}

Replace the border color of your choice and the border width. Now to go the HTML inside the content block and add class="test" to the table tag.

Regarding your last problem, you cannot resize table cells by dragging. You must bring up the cell properties (either through right clicking or selecting the drop down) and define the cell widths. To merge cells, you must have one cell selected, right click or select the dropdown, and select "merge right" or "merge below".

Eric L replied on December 03, 2008 18:56 to the question "Can better formatting be implemented in the content panel html editor?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Thanks for your suggestion. We'll definitely look into this.

Eric L replied on December 03, 2008 18:31 to the problem "Previews in sitemasher does not match published view." in Sitemasher:

In Sitemasher, there is the working version of your site in the studio, and the live, published version of your site. In the example you illustrated, you cannot make the exact change since even though a task is not published, the change is still reflected in your working version, so I will answer your question regarding additional change.

When you make a change to, say, Page A, and submit it for approval, the changes made gets set to the task list. During this time, you cannot submit the page for approval again until the tasks have been cleared. However, you are still able to make changes to the page. The task for the page will actually include the changes you've made AFTER the submission for approval. What we could do in the future is perhaps to lock objects that have been submitted for approval so that the task for that object will be for the changes up until the time the object got submitted for approval.

Eric L replied on December 03, 2008 02:22 to the problem "Previews in sitemasher does not match published view." in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

The differences between the preview and your live site could also be caused by the fact that you submitted changes to your site without bypassing the approval step. Therefore, you live version would not be updated until the tasks have been approved. Let us know if this is the case.

Eric L replied on December 03, 2008 02:11 to the problem "Previews in sitemasher does not match published view." in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Thanks for clarifying your situation. The issue that pertains to updating assets with the same name is on our end and it should be fixed in the next build. Just for one more clarification - did you upload the shorter image first (78px) or the taller image first (91px)?

Eric L replied on December 03, 2008 00:54 to the problem "html editor has formatting problems with tables" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

I tried it on another row as you specified and I am able to apply the heading. Could you try it again and see if you are able to do it? Try to create a brand new table.

Eric L replied on December 02, 2008 23:52 to the question "Cannot publish new positioning changes and editable content box." in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

The reason why the publish button does not allow checkboxes beside the pages you want to publish is that you have already submitted those pages for publishing. You cannot see the changes reflected on the live site yet because you did not bypass the approval step. See below:



To get your changes published, you now have to go to dashboard and go to the task tab. Select all the submitted tasks you submitted for approval and click on the publish button.

Remember, if you want to publish the site live immediately, check the option for bypassing approval.

Eric L replied on December 02, 2008 21:54 to the problem "Previews in sitemasher does not match published view." in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Did you upload 2 different images for that logo at different points in time? This might be a problem with image caching, as we've looked into the problem and found that the image shown in the preview had a 78px height versus the image on your live site with a 91px height.

Eric L replied on December 02, 2008 19:35 to the problem "html editor has formatting problems with tables" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Are you referring to the situation below? I was able to set the headings of text in a table in the content editor. Or are you referring to the custom code object?

Eric L replied on December 02, 2008 19:15 to the question "Could use a file browser in the html editor." in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Are you referring to the custom code object? Or the html view of the content block object? You can link a piece of text (or an image) inside a content block in the design view of the content block object. Please see below.



If you need to input your own HTML but want to have an interface to help you link to files or pages as well, I suggest using the content block editor and toggling between the normal design view and the html view.

Eric L replied on November 28, 2008 22:31 to the question "Is the end result standards-compliant? Valid XHTML and CSS? Accessible?" in Sitemasher:

Hi immeemz,

The native objects in Sitemasher generates standard compliant code. But since SItemasher allows for a lot of customization, such as hand coding your css, adding custom code, etc, the user can generate non-compliant code themselves. Also, standard compliance can depend on the user's side, for example, we would give an option for the user to add alt text to an image, but it is up to the user to input the proper alt text themselves.

Eric L replied on November 28, 2008 22:15 to the problem "Parent Page" in Sitemasher:

Hi Winnie,

The terms parent pages and child pages are relative terms that describe the relationship between the pages. A child page is a page at a lower level in a tree structure or hierarchy of site than its parent page.

In Sitemasher, on the left hand panel on the pages tab, you see the structure your site. The top level of your sites under the site map are called the root pages. If you have a page called home, you can drag a page called products into it such that it appears underneath home like so -



Now, home is the parent of products and products is the child of home. When you drag in the menu object, you can create a menu based on the site map, in which products would be a sub-page of home.

There is also a no parent folder, in which the pages inside are not part of the site page. If you put pages in this folder, the menu will not display these pages as part of the site page. Some temporary pages like a special promotional page can make use of this no parent folder.

Eric L replied on November 28, 2008 18:57 to the question "Can I transfer a site from my account to another account?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

What you have to do is add your client as a user to the site you are working on. This is done by going to the dashboard and going under the "users" tab. You can then add your client as various roles. Here is the help regarding the various accessibility of each role - http://dashboard.sitemasher.com/Help/...

Remember, building sites on Sitemasher is free, which means you only pay when you subscribe for a site to go live. You do not need to purchase an account to just do design and management for clients, since all you need to do is to add them as users, and have them make the subscriptions to their sites. Basically as a designer, you would be building sites and clients would pay for them with their accounts. We are looking into your previous suggestion regarding publishing a site live temporarily for testing purposes.

Eric L replied on November 26, 2008 19:08 to the question "Is there a way to edit Panel divs directly?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Do you mean editing the inline CSS of the div directly in the style summary? If so, we will be looking into that such that you may be able to edit the summary like in the style sheet tab.

Eric L replied on November 26, 2008 00:35 to the problem "analytics" in Sitemasher:

Hi big Mikey,

Can you specify what exactly is not working for you? Is there specific data that is not accurate? It will really help us fix and improve the feature more efficiently. Thanks.

Eric L replied on November 26, 2008 00:23 to the question "Can we publish to a Sitemasher url for testing?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Thanks for the response, you make a very valid point. We could get a feature request in our system that will perhaps generate link for each page, which you can show your clients (they would still have to go through a log in screen, but directly to the page and start navigating so they will not have to go through the whole Sitemasher dashboard UI). That is one idea, but we will definitely look for a solution for you.

Regarding your rendering problem, do you think you can specify what it is that you are seeing in the preview mode that is not appearing properly?

The progress bar is also a very good suggestion, and we will be looking into that as well.

Cheers.

Eric L replied on November 25, 2008 18:14 to the question "Can we publish to a Sitemasher url for testing?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Is there a reason why you don't want to use our preview function? You can simply log into your account on different computers and preview the sites. It will render your site the same as if your site were live.

Eric L replied on November 24, 2008 17:46 to the problem "I'm frustrated..... it shouldn't be this clunky to use.." in Sitemasher:

Hi Jeanette,

Our HTML import tool is work-in-progress right now and we apologize for the problems you've run into. For now, it is recommended that you build your pages in Sitemasher from scratch, but you can import CSS files to save yourself the trouble of creating the style sheet in Sitemasher. Thanks for telling us specific problems you ran across during the HTML import - it will definitely let us get the improvements in faster. If you really don't want to build it from scratch, you can email me the name you've given your site in Sitemasher as well as the email associated with it to ericl@sitemasher.com and I will look into the issue for you.

Regarding the problem of not being able to drag things to where it goes, drag and drop positioning only applies to objects that are absolutely positioned (like in Dreamweaver). I'm assuming your design is in relative positioning, so the positioning of objects will have to be done using CSS. Reordering of objects can still be done with drag and drop.

Eric L replied on November 24, 2008 17:29 to the question "Importing HTML templates to Master Pages" in Sitemasher:

Hi tester,

Our HTML tool is work-in-progress right now so it is recommended that you build your pages from scratch. You will see many improvements of the HTML import tool in the upcoming updates. What you can do for now to save you time is import the CSS files only, so you would not need to create the styles again in our system. However, our system only exposes classes for stylesheets right now so if you wanted to import your CSS file, you will have to change the ID to classes for any styling, maybe in a text editor first, (change the "#" to a ".") before importing into Sitemasher.

Feel free to ask specific questions if you are having trouble with the style sheets or setting up your master pages. We will try to get your site working in our system as smoothly as possible.

P.S. If you have the css file of your current site you are having trouble with, you can give us the link to it and we can see the problems it could run itno when Sitemasher parses it during import.

Eric L replied on November 21, 2008 18:58 to the question "Are panels divs?" in Sitemasher:

Hi Rayman,

Yes panels are in fact just divs.

You asked a very good question regarding page builder rendering versus preview rendering. In the page builder, we apply certain styles and add extra things that are only specific to the page builder that makes it easier for the designer to use. For example, the entire page would have a min-height just so that you can drag things inside it, otherwise it would default to a 0 height like it should normally. In your case, our panels have a default text-block inside as a tooltip, giving the panel a width in the page builder. Panels also have a default min-height in the builder, just so that you can see it even if you don't give it any set dimensions. However, these extra styles are not there when your site is published. Therefore, to see what your site really looks like, you must preview your site, which will render the page exactly as it should in the browser. The preview will look exactly as the published version of your site.