The TYPO3 web content management system (CMS) will be unavailable beginning 5 p.m. Friday, April 21, until 6 p.m. Sunday, April 23, during a backend system upgrade.
This change will lead to improved security for all users of NDSU websites, including those who submit sensitive information through online forms. It will also boost NDSU’s ranking in Web search…
For quite a while, there have been reports of workspace notification emails being dispatched despite a workspace being set for "no notifications." After the recent TYPO3 upgrade, the annoyance may…
Beginning at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 1, 2014 and continuing until noon on Sunday, March 2, 2014, CMS editing will be locked in order to prepare for a database update. Authors will not be able to…
At the IT Expo on October 23 you heard a fast overview of upcoming changes for CMS.
A video of the presentation, along with the presentation slides, will be posted on the Expo page soon.
Explore m…
It has been reported that notifications in workspaces are misbehaving since a recent TYPO3 security update was applied.
The behavior observed is that email notifications for publish are sent to…
Using the NDSU Admin module, you can view more workspace settings.
There aren't many settings in a workspace and you have been able to see the most important setting (members) for some time. Now you…
The upgrade is complete. If you find anything that doesn't work, please let us know.
If you see strange buttons in the rich text editor, or if the backend just looks "weird" in an unusable way, you…
There were unexpected problems with the server that led to CMS Web pages being unavailable to visitors for several hours Friday night. We had several people looking at the problem to find where and…
Most of the things you typically do and use in the CMS backend will not change in the new version; however, there are changes to the 'workflow' process you’ll want to know about, and there are some…
A CMS user group meeting is scheduled to introduce you to the upcoming version of TYPO3
- Thursday 27 October 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM
- Memorial Union Hidatsa room
During the weekend of October 28th through…
Recently we have noticed many emails come across the NDSU email distribution lists containing links directly to files in CMS. Those links look something like www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/...
This practice…
Blockquotes mean something; they're not a way to style your content.
The new NDSU template has been published. The process took a few hours, as there was a lot of content changes in the #ndsu-new-template draft workspace that was not related to the template change. The…
The www.ndsu.edu template is changing on Monday, August 8. Are you ready?
Resources mentioned during the TYPO3 user group meeting are provided. If you couldn't attend the meeting, you can review the screencast for details on the upcoming template transition.
In Memorial Union Arikara Room to present the new NDSU template.
Thanks to the careful attention to detail of one CMS user, we were able to track down a bug that has evaded us for many months in CMS that caused unusual behavior for some users of the CMS news…
If you find anything is not working as it should, please report it to the IT Help Desk or by submitting a CMS Help request online.
CMS pages may be intermittently unavailable through Sunday 10 October.
Access to log in and author content will be restored by 6:00 P.M. Fargo time on Sunday 10 October.
If you have a faculty site in CMS which has content on the main page, you are not affected by this change.
Faculty sites in CMS without any content were previously listed on the main www.ndsu.edu/fac…
CMS will be upgraded this weekend.
An informational meeting is scheduled for this Thursday.
Thursday 7 October
10:00 A.M. - 11:00 A.M.
Hidatsa Room, Memorial Union
The focus of the meeting is to…
CMS will be upgraded to a new version next weekend, 8-19 October.
A user group meeting will be held next week and is tentatively scheduled for 10:00 AM on Thursday 7 October.
At the meeting we will…
Please re-submit any CMS site requests you have submitted since 28 July 2010 through 7 September 2010
NDSU CMS Users:
I am pleased to announce that the CMS team will enhance CMS News with the addition of "social networking" links. Visitors to www.ndsu.edu sites that publish news using the news…
After TYPO3 was patched Sunday morning with security updates, the backend authoring environment did not load properly.
In light of the problem, the server has been updated so that CMS loads when…
The documented quota-reporting feature is now working. Since it was installed it had not been working, but now when you use the Filelist module you will see the quota summary for the selected folder…
The CMS error pages have been updated to match the style of error pages deployed on the main NDSU Web server for www.ndsu.edu sites.
Since error pages do not use the template from a site, all…
If you're unhappy with <//span> appearing in your Web pages, you are not alone. But how can you make it go away? There are four options:
Use a Firefox browser. Copy-and-pasting from Microsoft Office…
Because several people have succumbed to the "invisible link" bug, a work-around has been applied to assist others who might have the same problem. Now links will appear in the rich text editor inside…
The planned CMS Version 1.1 features are now available.
- www.ndsu.edu sites can choose from NDSU default and VPs template
- Youtube videos can be embedded with a "Youtube Potato" content element
- Permissio…
Faculty may now request sites in CMS. Requests will be completed on 1 November 2009.
A list of important information to know about faculty sites in CMS is available for your review.
The October edition of the CMS user group is scheduled for Tuesday, 13 October 2009.
The primary purpose of the meeting is to ramp up for the CMS version 1.1 release.
Meeting information is posted…
Due to the abnormally high volume of site and account requests, you should expect delays in the time it takes for these requests to be completed.
Changes are coming soon to CMS that will enable site…
For sites that use the news application, the Web address to view an individual news article has changed.
As a result of several sites experiencing difficulties, URL aliasing for news articles has been…
Two recently reported bugs with the CMS backend have been fixed.
Using Firefox 3.0.11 and the 3.5 beta releases, authors should be able to successfully insert links using the rich text editor.
A…
You should be aware that the most recent Firefox update 3.0.11, released June 11, is not compatible with the TYPO3 rich text editor.
Symptom: links inserted using the rich text editor are prefixed…
Follow-up from April user group meeting and new information regarding TYPO3 with IE8.
With a minor adjustment in the order RealURL processing occurs, preliminary tests show that URL decoding for news articles is working "better." So far I am not able to trigger an incorrect news…
A upload field was previously available in some backend forms so that the Filelist module could be bypassed. This behavior has been disabled for most, if not all, instances.
Using the upload field…
Updated the display of the border content column for NDSU sites to include the graphic gold top as specified by University Relations. In addition, when there is no border content present, the gold…
For www.ndsu.edu sites, updated the left navigation (NAV3) to:
Not link to the home page when on the home page - this is to avoid visitor confusion when the displayed page doesn't change on click,…
For www.ndsu.edu sites, the behavior of the top navigation (black navigation bar) has been updated so that site owners can apply custom navigation without submitting a help request.
Instead, simply…
Updated the news feeds for www.ndsu.edu sites to escape special characters like ampersands (&) in article titles and description. This will avoid future errors with broken feeds in the event such a…
For all NDSU sites, the "banner link" (activated by clicking on the banner graphic) has been updated to point to the site home page in a different way.
Previously, the link was hard-coded to point to…
The print stylesheet has been updated to include link URLs after the link text. An example of what this would look like is shown below.
Note that this functionally currently does not work in…
Updated the print stylesheet to prepend the graphic used for note, tip and warning paragraphs. Previously, the printed version of a page used a colored border to provide highlight to these…
Fixed two bugs that may be noticeable to authors.
Quotas
File quotas have not been successfully enforced in CMS since we began using it. This meant that authors were able to upload more than the…
During the past week (9/24-9/29), the CMS site request form (now at www.ndsu.edu/cms/request_site ) failed.
Although no errors were reported to the requester, any requests submitted during this…
CMS infrastructure, including TYPO3 and its extensions, was upgraded Thursday through Sunday and now includes several new features and bug fixes. Most notably,
- Move pages and page contents in draft…
Next Thursday, 4/10, changes are coming to TYPO3 CMS.
NDSU Search plugin
This plugin will allow visitors to use the NDSU search from within a site instead of visiting www.ndsu.edu/search directly. …
Updates or changes have been applied to the way pages are displayed in TYPO3.
In an effort to make Web sites more consistent with university and technical standards -- and to make content more accessible to users with disabilities -- ITS is making some changes to the TYPO3 rich…
In the next month, ITS plans to replace the search engine used on NDSU Web pages. The new engine will allow users to find content on all university Web sites, including those created in TYPO3.
As a…
A previously-posted notice about adding the Anti Bias graphic/link to template footers has been postponed due to concerns about design and use.
Notice will be posted before a new design is…
University Relations has designed the Anti Bias graphic and link into the template footer for CMS. A screen shot illustrating the footer (using ITS as an example) for each text size is included…
You may be interested in these updates in CMS that will occur soon.
Text size selector
As discussed at TYPO3 user group meetings, a text size selector will be added to the page template. The…
Until now, the "Border" content column displayed as text floated to the right in a Web page without any real borders. Now, when you add Border content, it will display as it was originally intended…
Upgraded TYPO3 to version 4.0.6.
Major changes include:
* Fixed bug #5266: WamCom browser check in htmlarea.js conflicted with Firefox 2.0.0.3
* Fixed bug #4207: User>Workspaces shows…
Three University Relations-designed paragraph styles are now available for your use in TYPO3. They can be used to highlight important information in a page. An example follows:
This is a paragraph…
I have installed some new features for the TYPO3 login page. A summary follows.
- Pop-up checking
- Some have discovered that forgetting to allow pop-ups before using TYPO3 can have consequences of…
RealURL is the application that makes the URLs for sites hosted in TYPO3 human-readable. Due to some unusual behavior and bugs in the TYPO3 back-end, I have disabled RealURL for the cms.ndsu.edu site…
News articles can be inserted individually onto a page in the same way as content elements.
This feature should be used in moderation, when the situation warrants. When possible, it is preferable to…
I recently upgraded TYPO3 and several out-of-date extensions. For the most part, you should not notice any changes. However, because these were bug fixes, you may notice that some things "work…
I updated the RTE to rtehtmlarea version 1.4.2 and reconfigured the editor from the ground up. Changes are summarized below.
- Added the necessary configuration to support the paragraph and text…
I observed that the page tree took a while to render in IE6 and identified the problem as a Javascript fix for IE's poor transparent PNG support. Executing this script took some time and to speed…
I observed that links to other domains within TYPO3 were not setting the URL properly. A link from ITS to ITSECURITY was being generated with the ITS URL and as a result didn't work.
So I added the…
I have been alerted to a few bugs with TYPO3 in IE7 and am working to resolve them. As you discover things that seem "odd," please let me know.
One known difference from IE6 to IE7 is that the…
In the previous configuration, when pasting into the TYPO3 RTE from external sources like MSWord or another web page, any instances of the deprecated "font" tags were rendered as "< font >< /font >"…
Changed the "Campus Directory" portion of web template used for the ITS home page to
- Render nicer in text browsers, and
- Include a "skip navigation" link to be be more accessible
The look should be…
Up until recently, the main www.its.ndsu.edu page was cached for periods of 10 minutes. This meant that, if another person had not already visited the page within the past 10 minutes, a new visitor…
To help keep TYPO3 users up to date on the CMS changes, I have inserted the cms.ndsu.edu RSS feed into the login page. I notice that it takes a moment to process all of the news items, but please…
To achieve the highest level of accessibility, all form text fields and textboxes should include some "default text" to alert a Web site viewer to the presence of a text input field. On the down…
Alright folks, for the third (or fourth) but final time, I have got an error page working that gives some site information. The design and contents still needs to be worked out, but it ought to be…
A new backend skin is available for TYPO3. It is called "NDSU Default TYPO3 Skin." Soon it will be implemented as the default skin, but in the interim you can opt-in to try it out.
Procedure to…
Moments ago, I modified the ITS template (and consequently any future sites using this design) to use a second column. The column is to be known as the "border" column and it will appear in the…
Starting at line 957 of class.tx_ttnews.php:
// JEA: Wed Sep 6 17:26:25 CDT 2006
// This is substituted when there is no news in the list ... and so I want to do something better
// than to just…
Because some RSS readers use the <guid> tag to determine if a feed item is new, I added the tag to the RSS2 template file (typo3conf/ext/tt_news/res/rss_2.tmpl). In the long-term, we should create a…
For TYPO3 backend users only (that is, this does not affect the look of the front web sites such as www.its.ndsu.edu) -
Another skin option is available. The new option, a skin that will eventually…
The "Edit Page Properties" button was not filling with the proper "Edit Page Properties" information. I tracked the problem down to the extension "Gobernalia BE Drag and Drop." Will have to be aware…
Update 2: Wed Aug 16 13:18:36 CDT 2006
The problem as described below is a semi-known problem. It is documented to be a problem with our speaking URLs (e.g. http://www.its.ndsu.edu/help instead of htt…
The XML feed (http://www.its.ndsu.edu/help_desk/outages/file.rss) was not creating links directly to the single news items. Since a singlePid on the feed appears to be domain-wide, I opted to insert…
Previously, bold/italics/underline would work only for entire paragraphs. I believe that these styles now work for individual words and portions or paragraphs. Try it out and let me know if some…
Image content inserted to be displayed above or below content was, instead of displaying as a block element, wrapped with text.
To fix the problem, I inserted some CSS code into the main CSS…
I believe there was a stale extension installed that was causing the following error when attempting to insert sitemaps and inserting new content.
tx_auxnewsmailer_newsletter
2: SQL error: 'Unknown…
Pages with news content had anomalies like {$content.wrap.link} displayed in text. The problem was remedied by removing the tt_news static template import, saving the template, clearing the cache,…
The "insert/modify image" feature has been turned on in the rich text editor. Now you can add images using a more common interface.
Find out how on the CMS How-to Add images page.
While testing a process to automatically publish pages/contents that has been approved by ITS reviewers, all pages/contents in the its_offline workspace were published earlier today.
If you made…