Just over three months ago Squiz released the Easy Edit Suite dazzling us all with its shiny, Mini-esque interface.
The Easy Edit Suite has now reached Phase 2 and here is an overview of some of the feature I am personally looking forward to:- The ability to exit the Easy Edit Suite without logging out of MySource Matrix (Squiz Matrix)
- Asset Finder which allows a user to navigate the assets within a site, locating and redirecting to assets they want to edit. Dynamic asset lineages and displayed child counts mean that navigating even the most complex site is an effortless experience.
- The Asset Finder not only accommodates easy navigation, but also enables several functions that were not previously available to users. One such function is the Nested Content division.
- The Direct Children section in the Asset Finder displays the details of the asset's children and allows you to re-order these assets and navigate to a child's editing interface or directly to its linking screen.
- Asset Creation Wizard allows you to create assets anywhere in your site at virtually any time. The Asset Creation Wizard's interface is simple and easy to use, with creatable asset types listed under selectable categories.
- The Create Wizard screen has some nifty features including the automatic generation of file asset titles, populated from the uploaded file name; the Show in Menu option, giving users the ability to create assets as either type 1 or type 2 linked assets, and the option of creating assets in multiple locations by selecting multiple parents (the Asset Finder comes in handy here too!).
Screenshots:
Asset Finder
Asset Creation Wizard
Squiz Analytics is based on Google Analytics and uses the Google Analytics API to retrieve your site's traffic and usage information. But Squiz Analytics is not just another view of Google Analytics. The goal is to both improve the presentation of information that is important to you and fill some gaps in the functionality of Google Analytics.
It's important to note that Squiz Analytics does not require a Squiz CMS or Squiz Matrix system to use. All it requires is a Google Analytics account that is tracking usage on one or more sites. It can also connect to multiple accounts if you wish. Although Squiz Analytics has a powerful goal tracking feature, it does not require you to have any goals configured in Google Analytics. You can add goals through Squiz Analytics and, unlike Google Analytics, historical goal conversions will be calculated immediately. However, Squiz CMS will be required to utilise the A/B/C testing feature of Squiz Analytics, although the plan is to allow this feature to be used with any site in the future, including Squiz Matrix powered sites.
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My wife Tanya and I have recently returned from our holiday in Amalfi, Italy. I have uploaded some of the photos to the Gallery and Flickr.
Squiz have recently announced the launch of Squiz's new open source web experience management platform: Squiz Suite.
Squiz is retiring MySource Matrix, but in name only. Meet Squiz Matrix!
- Squiz Matrix is the latest release of the popular MySource Matrix enterprise content management system. It delivers highly flexible and robust business integration and application development tools.
- Squiz CMS is a highly usable interface for editing and publishing content within the Squiz Suite. It features true inline editing, context sensitive help and powerful collaboration features.
- Squiz Analytics offers innovative and powerful tools to help optimise site content. Set goals and test the results using fully integrated and simple to use A/B/C testing. Squiz Analytics integrates with Google Analytics allowing you to leverage the functionality you already value.
- Squiz Search utilises the Funnelback search engine (www.funnelback.com) to deliver high quality search results, contextual navigation and search based applications.
We at Squiz have recently been faced with a task of designing a drag-and-drop interface. This got me thinking of different potential possibilities and now that MySource Matrix includes Javascript API we can build very slick interfaces (or as we call them Simple Edit Interfaces).
I have built a very simple example of how we can use drag-and-drop with MySource Matrix. In this example you can edit the content of the right-hand column by selecting widgets to be displayed and the order they are displayed in. As an extra, you can also modify the content of each widget. We've got a Free Text widget and a News widget, where you can enter an id for a root node (doesn't have to be a text box of course). I didn't bother creating a listing of news as this is a standard functionality.
So, here is how it's implemented:
I used drag-and-drop plugin from Nettuts+ and with minor modifications I had it working with Matrix. I have two metadata fields on the page. One stores a coma separated list of asset IDs of the assets used on the page and the second stores IDs of the assets not used. I then used an asset listing to display the assets stored in "Assets used" metadata field by using "Array of specific asset IDs" option in Dynamic Parameters. The order will be the same as the order in our metadata.
For the edit functionality, I created another asset listing, which is being nested on the page twice. In the first instance I pass a get variable which uses value of the "Assets not used" metadata field and in the second instance I pass the value of the "Assets used" metadata field. Whenever you make changes using drag-and-drop, there is a script which generates new lists of IDs and when you hit SAVE writes our values into metadata using Javascript API.
(I had a bit of a problem with one of the metadata fields being empty, which meant that our asset listings would list all available widgets when we want it to not return anything. To solve this issue, I created an Empty Widget of type CSS File with an empty customised type format in each asset listing. I then modified the script to set the metadata field value to the ID of our CSS File if a list is empty).
There is also a metadata field which stores the content of the Free Text widget and another field to store the News root node.
Take a look at this example. I gave it public write permissions so you can test the functionality. Leave a comment if you have any questions.U.S. and U.K. companies and agencies cite quality, not cost, as the primary reason.
This year could be of critical importance to the open source software industry, with a recent survey showing a majority of businesses and organizations in the U.S. and United Kingdom expecting to increase investment in it this year.
A survey by Accenture also showed that nearly 40 percent of those queried also planned to migrate critical operations to open source systems in the next 12 months
Until recently if I ever needed to create an element with a double border, like on the example below, I would use nested DIVs.
I have recently discovered a way of doing this on a single element (IE<IE8 users look away)...
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Some of us may have heard of such services as LESS (Leaner CSS) and Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets), but not many would have had a chance to use them. LESS was originally built with Ruby and allowed us to use variables, operators, mix-inx and nested selectors to construct our CSS.
LESS has recently been completely rewritten in JavaScript and will, eventually, become LESS 2.0. It will be able to run directly in the browser, as well as on the server, with node.js (which I am not going to cover here).
LESS.js is not yet a complete product, but does work great and is something we can already utilise for building our CSS.Continue...
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