With a new version number, you know it is a big update! We now have full AJAX support with a library called Ext2. This will also help standardize the user interface and bring lots of new cool tools and widgets. You’ll find the toolbars
different including a “quick editor” and a “style highlight” button at
the bottom of the page. Ext2 is built on the open source toolkit called "YAHOO! User Interface" also known as YUI.
What's New?
Quick editor this is mostly for doing quick text changes without having to load up the main editor. Note however that the formatting displayed in the quick editor may not exactly match the page formatting; use the main editor when formatting is important.
Style highlight now you can easily see what style is applied to what element. Click the style highlight button and the name of any applied style is shown in a popup. In this example we see that the HTML element is A - anchor with a style of mainNav. To change the look, you would edit global styles and find mainNav.
Toolbars– toolbars now hover over the page so they don’t displace page layout. This can sometimes cause toolbars to get hidden under each other. If you think a toolbar went missing, click the “Float/Unfloat toolbars” button (in the bottom toolbar) to display them anchored in the page. The positioning arrows of the old toolbar have been replaced by drag and drop. To reorder elements, simply click the tab and drag the tool bar to a new spot (must be another tool bar) and release.
File cabinet – double click on any item to change it, e.g. double click Title to change the title. Select one or multiple lines when using the top buttons for save or delete. Right click a line to edit or “edit parameters”. The file cabinet heading lines can be adjusted in width and by what columns you want to display by clicking the arrow in the column heading. Try this one for listing pages hierarchically: select type page, on the Parent column click the arrow and select Group by this Field. Pages are now display hierarchically . It may take a while to adjust to the new features, to return to the old file cabinet, just edit the url and change “showVer2.asp” to “showVer.asp”.
Strict Formatting:
There are also some stricter formatting rules in this update. This is to help the page appear the same across browsers. However, you may now find some things that were bold before are now not bold.
This resulted from pasting from Word. Word uses a lot of <em> and <strong> tags for italic and bold. For best compatibility across browsers use <i> and <b> tags instead.
Do this by simply reapplying bold AND italic in the main editor.
Click in the text and you’ll see a line like:
TABLE > TBODY > TR > TD > B > A > FONT > EM > RemoveElement
Click RemoveElement to remove the EM and reapply italic.
Flash and Popups:
The new update uses a lot more popup windows but sometimes Flash movies are displayed over the popup. You can position the popup window by dragging the banner but to fix it permanently you must change/add wmode in your flash parameters:
'wmode', 'transparent', What's Next? Expect more and more of the tools to be released in templates and objects you can place on your site. For instance the features you see in the file cabinet are being integrated into the catalog search results page.
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