Douwe de Wilde

Upcoming Smartlet Enhancements

Smartlets have become the mainstay of reusable site building in Smartsite iXperion, but their use can be too technical for editors. To keep a smartlet versatile as many properties as possible should be set editable, but this will overwhelm the user with controls in the smartlet editor. The editor then adds a tab for box properties, even though most sites will use the same set of box settings throughout. In Smartsite iXperion 1.4 we will be introducing Smartlet Presets. Presets allow the site builder to...

Internet Explorer 8 changes

As Internet Explorer 8 is being pushed by Microsoft as a high priority update, we'll have to cope with its idiosyncrasies. A few breaking changes have plagued the Smartsite manager. Some things are just different, others could be called bugs. Named event handlers Older version of IE would return an anonymous function when requesting an event handler, but IE8 returns a function named after the event that it handles (onclick, onchange, etc). JavaScript code in the manager that parses the function...

Enriching client-side forms with Smartlets

Best practices for ASP.Net Ajax (I'd link to Microsoft's documentation, but it's an hour's worth of video of rather poor quality) specify that your application fails gracefully when the client does not support JavaScript (or the user has disabled scripting for your site). Here's an example of how to add an Ajax callback to your form. We'll be calling back to the server to retrieve the user's street address and home town after he enters his zip code. Some of the features used in this example are new to Smartsite...

iXperion's new browse security model

Because the new Smartsite Publicationn Engine will use the tries and tested Smartsite 5.2 manager in the back end, the browse security system for Smartsite needs to be compatible with the old implementation of browse access/manager access. On the other hand we want to be able to use a more fine-grained access model. Folders are no longer the atomic elements of security, and neither are user groups. Access can be granted to individual users on individual items. The data model looks like this: (irrelevant...