What Is contentEditable?

JavaScript editors are all fundamentally based on a technology called contentEditable which makes a part of the web page become editable by the user. While there is a lot of functionality that’s usually bundled under the “contentEditable” title, there are a few core parts which are essential for a browser to support correctly1{#footlink1:1278939007857.footnote}:

• Selection – allowing the user to position a text caret in the content and select various parts of it.
• Content entry and deletion – allowing the user to type basic text and to delete selected content.

Without these two key components of contentEditable it’s impossible to create a high-quality, WYSIWYG editor with JavaScript. Despite some variations in how things work, this functionality is available on all common desktop browsers and has been for quite a few years.

Ephox EditLive! is now part of the IBM cloud offering on Amazon Web Services. EditLive! OEM edition is bundled in the cloud offering of IBM WCM. This means you can now quickly run up a new instance of IBM’s WCM system on Amazon EC2 and configure it to use EditLive! as the editor.

If you want to take advantage of the extra benefits of the Enterprise Edition (track changes, commenting, accessibility checking, image editing and more), you can install that as normal once the system is running. Currently Ephox doesn’t have per-hour pricing through Amazon but you can contact our sales team so they can discuss the options available.

If you’ve tried to set up Alfresco 3.2 and use the WCM component, you’ve probably run into one or more1{#footlink1:1260264856408.footnote} of these problems:

1. When you click “Preview Website” you get an unable to connect message.

   • You need to start the virtualization server that provides the previews or configure it’s IP correctly.

2. When you click “Preview Website” you get a blank page and the browser is “connecting” forever.

   • You did the right thing and entered a root password other than ‘admin’ in the installer and now you’re being punished for it. Go and update the virtualization server configuration and give it the admin password you entered.

3. When you click “Preview Website” you get a response immediately that just reports “Virtual website not found”.

Andrew Shebanow in Open Government and PDF:

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed. I’ve actually worked with a number of government departments who were looking to move more content online and the content conversion problem is definitely a time consuming and challenging part of the problem. That’s precisely why I wind up getting involved, since EditLive! lets you easily copy and paste content from Word documents and produce clean, compliant XHTML. It can even (optionally) strip out inline formatting and leave just the structure like headings, tables and lists.

I’m stumped so I’m throwing this one out there in the hope that someone might know the answer. I have a JSP component that builds a URL to create a new content item, in a specific site area with a specific authoring template. It works great on Portal 6.0.1.3 and Portal 6.1.0.0 but breaks on 6.1.0.1 and 6.1.0.2. When you go to the URL, it correctly starts creating content but instead of skipping the stage where it asks for an authoring template it just gives a blank list to choose from. If you omit the authoring template from the URL it will correctly list all templates and go on to create the content.

Note to self:

That magical file that controls just about everything you ever want to control about IBM LWCM (at least so far as things that are controlled from the file system rather than the web interface) is under the profile directory at /wcm/shared/app/config/wcmservices/WCMConfigService.properties

This includes:

• configuring backwards compatibility for WCM 6.0 -> 6.1 migrations. Primarily the don’t expire content immediately when no expire date is set.
• setting up the SMTP server properties so you can get e-mail notifications in workflow
  • Side note: These get annoying really quickly if you’re not careful.
• A bunch of stuff on caching that looks cool. I wonder what the changes I just made will do…

Also, why did it take me this long to add fancy list bullet styles to my blog stylesheet? Mixing the blue and green is probably a bit much – I should create a blue tick or green arrow, but oh well, I’m drunk with power.

The Australian brings news of the growing battle for mobile banking leadership among Australian banks:

Brisbane-based Suncorp launched the first mobile browser-based banking service and last week made it compatible with iPhone and Google Android handsets.

The Commonwealth Bank has similarly updated its mobile service, which will work on any internet-enabled mobile phone, and has additional functionality for the iPhone.

People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for a long time. In fact, as the article mentions, the Commonwealth Bank had previously tried to jump on the mobile banking wagon as early as 1999 via a WAP interface. So what’s changed and what does this have to do with accessibility?

Pangle on Twitter:

Ephox EditLive Editor will change the world. Well maybe not the world, but it will make WCM content easier to format. I couldn’t agree more. This is of course in response to the news coming out of Lotusphere that IBM has licensed EditLive! as a standard part of their WCM offering. Ephox has been an IBM business partner for quite a few years now and has built up a lot of relationships with their technical and sales teams as well as selling EditLive! as a third party add-on to a lot of WCM clients. It’s very exciting to see this go up a step and have EditLive! as a standard part of the offering. I don’t have an exact ship date for the OEM version yet, but my understanding is that it will come as an update to Portal 6.1.

One of the popular geek pissing contests is comparing how far back your email archives go. It’s a game I’ve enjoyed playing in the past and quite regularly one given that I’d never deleted an email (ahh the days before spam…). Still, as Andy has just discovered, it’s not always as useful as it first seems:

 I have to say though I’m not sure keeping all of this email was the best idea. I’ve glanced at a few old emails while sorting this evening and… well put it this way, would you want a detailed account of your uni years? If your email is just building up without requiring any effort on your part then there’s no real advantage to deleting it and it may as well sit there. Once you come to expend time and effort migrating that email though it just becomes a waste of your time. The trouble is, now that you’ve got all that email, you’ve got no idea which bits are important to keep and which aren’t. You’re stuck on the treadmill of migrations until it eventually gets so time consuming that you figure it’s easier to just dump everything and start again.

Believe it or not, it’s been almost exactly 2 years since I kicked off LiveWorks! as essentially a skunk-works project to get some of our internal experiments out into the open so they proved useful. As it turns out the bigger success has been the weekly hints and tips that we started adding a few months later. Unless one of the migrations has messed up the dates, the first tip was a simple overview of how to integrate EditLive! that Rob wrote. I still regularly refer people to that article.  Since then we’ve posted a new article every single week without fail.

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.

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!