A Case Study in Website Maintenance (CMS) using XML
Editing Instructions
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PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL MODIFICATIONS TO THE SAMPLE
PAGES ARE LOST after 15 minutes of no page publication activity by you or others or
at midnight eastern time (regardless of activity), whichever occurs first. Since you are working with a local copy of
the XML content, this does not affect modifications you may currently be making —
BUT if you expect to see your previously published changes 15 minutes later, they may or
may not be there.
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| INSTRUCTIONS: |
- All form elements function pretty much as expected.
- Rolling the cursor over a red arrow (
 ).
causes a drop down list of insertable page elements to appear. The list is
context sensitive and only those options available for insertion at
that point in the page are available.
- To publish the page, you must first preview it using the button near the bottom
of the page. Once previewed, you can return to the Page Edit Form or publish the page.
- On both the Page Edit Form and the Preview page, you can display the current XML or the
transformed XHTML. These buttons were (and still are) extremely useful to us when the wizard
behind the curtain didn't act according to our wishes. They're mostly useful on these
demo pages as a sneak peek behind the curtain.
- Click here to download a .reg file that can be used to add an "XMLEdit Edit Page" menu
item to the Internet Explorer context menu. After downloading, navigate to the destination directory and simply double click
on XMLEdit.reg to register the IE context menu entry. For easy editing of any demo .html page, right click to display
IE's context menu, and then select the XMLEdit Edit Page menu item.
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| CAVEATS: |
- To successfully change an existing image or insert a new one, you must allow
access data sources across domains. This can be found in the option list displayed
by clicking on Customize Level on the Security tab in IE's Internet Options dialog box.
For more information, see ADO and RDS Security Issues in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
- IE loses the cursor when a loss of focus on a form element causes
an XML node to be added to the DOM and the new XHTML is displayed. Our workaround
was to force the cursor to the next available form element after the one just
changed. This is correct a majority of the time as many people tab forward through
the form elements when editing the page. However, you may find that occassionally
a backward tab or a mouse click in another form element does not place the cursor where
you expect. We are researching methods by which we can add more intelligence to the
workaround, but it is not a high priority task.
- IE crashes when adding or deleting "a number" of new elements. This seems to occur
only when working within the lists of merchandise. In view of the number of reported defects
within the Win32 system DLL where this crash occurs, our expectations of a quick fix were very low.
Instead, our <sarcasm>truly ingenious</sarcasm>
workaround here was the implementation of the Save button near the bottom
of the page. It updates the XML file on the server, but does not publish the XHTML page for
general consumption.
- Occassionally, a second menu appears in the page banner. A page reload should eliminate it.
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| ITEMS THAT APPEAR MODIFIABLE BUT ARE NOT: |
- Although you can replace an image on the page with another and preview that change,
the new image will not be transferred to our server nor displayed on the actual published page.
- If you insert a new image into a page, the new image will appear in your page preview.
However, the new image will not be transferred to our server nor displayed on the actual published page.
Instead the published page will display a placeholder image with the text "User Inserted Image".
- The page title can be changed and previewed locally, but will not be changed on the
server.
- The file name cannot be changed.
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