IWWCM has a component specifically to provide “inline editing” – in other words, adding links to content items so you can quickly edit, accept, reject or delete if you’re logged in as a user who has permission to do such things.  I have two problems with this approach:

1. You have to be logged in to see the links.
2. The links affect the way the page looks so you don’t see the site the same way as normal visitors.

Within a portal environment or even an intranet, neither of those problems really apply, but when you’re publishing out a public website they can be an issue.

You’re sitting on the train listening to music on your iPhone. Your wife rings, you answer it and the girl sitting cross from you suddenly gives you an odd look. What went wrong? When you have headphones in the iPhone makes no audible ringing noise. So people around you have no idea that you just took a call. Not that Id change this but it does generate some odd looks. Especially when you answer with “hey sweety”. Oh well.

The Ephox bloggers have been way too quiet lately (myself included) so I thought I’d start an Ephox meme. What’s your 5 favorite features of any of Ephox’s products?  They might be built in or plugins that we’ve developed, maybe even features of our internal systems that make your life easier, but preferably something that our clients could get hold of (teasing people just isn’t nice).

Here’s my list:

1. Built-in Image Editor. Particularly being able to resize an image and add rounded corners and drop shadow.
2. Pop out window mode. More editing space is always good.
3. Automatically detecting URLs on the clipboard and using them as the default value in the hyperlink dialog.
4. Styles menu. Not that I use it on this blog, but having access to classes in the site style sheet make it so easy  to apply some really nice formatting with just a couple of clicks.  The styles package prototype we use internally a lot is particularly useful for this.
5. The extensible APIs. It’s so nice to be able to quickly add support for footnotes, a shiny button generator or whatever I happen to want this week. I wish more clients used this functionality to make life easier for their users – even if it was just by providing a handful of simple templates they could insert.

I tag Suneth, Damien and Brett…

For future reference, James Tauber has a very useful article on using the HSL color scheme to create shiny gradient buttons.  It’s worth knowing that in Java HSL is actually called HSB (brightness instead of luminosity) and there are various methods on the java.awt.Color class for converting between HSB and RGB as well as creating color objects directly from HSB.

After my amazingly successful use of mod_proxy to provide clean URLs in an IWWCM instance, it’s been added to my bag of useful tricks to know about.  When you realize you can proxy differently based on the current virtual host it’s a very powerful solution.

My latest use for it was to add name based virtual host support to two completely separate virtual machines.  One machine runs IBM WCM and the other runs Quickr. Both use the same port, and in the future there will be more VMs with different versions as well, so while it would be possible to assign different port numbers, I’d prefer to not have to remember which VM is using which port etc.  The firewall however can only forward connections on a given port to one VM.

I was going to write a post around accessibility and WCAG 2.0 but got annoyed once again about the EditLive! toolbar taking up two lines instead of one.  I’d already removed a whole bunch of stuff from it but it was still wrapping around by a few buttons.

It occurred to me that there are a range of functions that I had on the toolbar because I use them frequently, but that aren’t actually required because I always use the keyboard shortcut. In particular, I have no need for cut, copy, paste, undo or redo because without exception I use keyboard shortcuts. I could probably apply the same logic to strong, em and insert hyperlink as well but my toolbar fits on one line with them so they may as well stay.

They aren’t really new anymore, but I just discovered them.  Apparently the Dutch accessibility laws go beyond just the WCAG standard and require a whole range of best practices for web sites.  Good stuff.

There’s a lot of talk around at the moment about how to allow cross-domain AJAX requests without compromising security. What I don’t get, is why this whole thing is an issue. What’s the difference between the two examples below:

Option 1: Browser connects to site A which loads JavaScript and initiates a request via AJAX to site B.

Option 2: Browser connects to site A which loads JavaScript and initiates a request via AJAX back to site A. The server at site A proxies the AJAX request to site B.

Permissions and an edit link.

All too often we think of wikis as some special breed of software that’s completely different to CMS. In reality any good CMS should be able to be a wiki simply by opening up the permissions, removing the workflow and adding an “Edit this page” link when viewing the site. The problem is, most CMS implementations spend all their time focussing on locking things down and adding 10 stage workflows. It’s no wonder user adoption is such a problem, no one has the required permission to do anything!

As part of a very good series on sustainable software, Gianugo Rabellino writes:

The market couldn’t care less about your developers’ kids in need of new sneakers or your VC craving about his next Lambo: the argument that someone has to pay for software development is one of the biggest straw man of Open Source – the market pays for value, and if you build very little, guess what, you won’t get more than peanuts. This isn’t just limited to Open Source software or even software in general. Far too often people make the mistake of thinking that company expenses justify the price of goods and it’s simply not the case. Value to the consumer decides what something is worth and if that happens to be below the cost of manufacture that’s the company’s problem, not the consumer’s. If that means the company stops making the product, consumer’s won’t care because they’ve already decided to go without.

Dear lazyweb (actually, just more intelligent web, I’ve done a lot of searching on this already…),

I have a nice install of WebSphere Application Server and IBM Portal 6.0.1.3 up and running with the WCM component configured. This is great, really happy.

I’d like to add Quickr (later also Connections and maybe even Sametime) but all the Quickr installs I can find want to deploy a second instance of WAS which isn’t ideal. Is it possible to just add Quickr to an existing install or is it possible to install it separately and move it into an existing install?

Since the search function for Apple’s mailing lists is pretty much useless, I’m making a note of the Reading PICT Images thread which contains numerous options for rendering PICT images in Java on OS X.