BG Views Developer Blog - College Publisher/mtvU

Update on BG News Archive

2010-01-26T05:48:43Z

I have an update about our little problem of missing about 10 years of archives from our site. Since leaving College Publisher in December, we have been patiently, eagerly, relentlessly waiting for our archives and users databases. This past Saturday College Publisher provided the archive database to us. Yea... don't get excited yet.

]]> CoPress to convert our CP5 data to something we can use, namely WordPress WXR format. CoPress seems to be the go-to place for refugees of College Publisher. I looked into them but have a fond liking for Movable Type, if you have not noticed.

Once I get our data in WordPress WXR and have it running in a WP site, I have a lot of manual data manipulation ahead of me. While CP4 had Sections, CP5 did not. While CP4 had both Author Names and Author Positions, CP5 did not. Not to mention there is over 4 years of data in there from before we partnered with College Publisher!

Once I can combine Authors and Categories in WordPress, I can export another WXR and then do the final import of my sanitized archive - from mid-2000 - into Movable Type. Then it will be time to have a geek dance.

Issuu Widget Setup for CP5 and MT

2009-06-05T03:34:54Z

Right now if you go the home page of bgviews.com (CP5) or the home page of bgviewsnetwork.com (MT) you will see a Flash-based widget from Issuu showing the latest issue. This is completely automated, which is something that CP5 could not do - College Publisher even suggested Issuu as the solution to the shortcommings of CP5. In CP4, it would auto thumnail, and automatically place the latest PDF in the sidebar for us, we just had to tell the tool which PDF to use. And now we are back to being just as much, if not more, automated.

Now I need to build out a PDF Archive section in our MT site, something else that CP4 did for us, and now we need to do ourselves. The PDF will be officially launching the PDF Archive in the fall, and likely have a soft launch sometime this summer.

CP5 Trick: Create a "Clipboard" For Often Used Objects

2009-03-03T05:46:14Z

Depending on your layout, you may have a structure which has objects inside a right column splitter, inside of a main column splitter, which is how the four column split on parts of our home page. Say you edit an object inside the Right Column Splitter every day. Instead of moving through that navigation daily, which is quite slow in CP5, do this:

At the root of your site tree go to Sub pages and Create new page. Make sure to check Hide in navigation. Note: only top level Pages can be hidden. Name it Clipboard or something easily identifiable. This Page is still going to be accessible on your site, but since nothing will link to it, this should not pose a problem to you.

Since when you use the Copy/Paste buttons in CP5, every time you Paste, you are actually creating an instance of the original object. Change it in one spot and it changes globally. Now you can place your objects inside a splitter inside a splitter, and still get to them easily using your new "Clipboard."

How To: Manage RSS Feeds in CP5

2009-03-03T04:09:01Z

Unlike most every CMS I have come across, managing the RSS feed is a chore and takes a lot of time that it should not. In order for the breadcrumb trail to work, you need to create the articles under the sub menu Pages. In our case, that would be like Sports under Our Views.

However, to get all the Sports articles to also show up in the main RSS feed, the articles have to be "copied" into the Articles tab of the root of the tree, BG Views. Click the thumbnail to the right to see the tab with a big red arrow pointing to it.

Click the Edit button, this allows you to use the Copy/Paste buttons. From the left frame click the Search tab, then Advanced. Select "latest hour" (you will be doing this right after you finish putting the articles in) then select "Saved by me" and click Search. You can now copy all the section specific articles into the main RSS feed by Copy/Paste into the Articles tab.

Campus Blotter
The Campus Blotter has a special section page at the root of the tree in the left frame. This is because you cannot hide sub menu items (which is lame). Be sure and go to the Campus Blotter Page and "copy" the blotter if you added one that day.

Once done, the section specific RSS feeds work, and the main RSS feed works, making all of our readers who love RSS (like me) happy.

Three Issues In, CP5 Goes Down

2009-03-02T21:47:07Z

As if daily maintenance in prime time EST is not enough, last night between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM the CP5 Admin site was only up for short burst here and there. Otherwise the site would time out, or I could login but only see the left frame, not the right frame where all the work is done.

For me, I was updating our templates, updating the Classifieds section, and generally adding more content to make the site look better. For Craig, he was trying to publish the daily stories. He finally left a little before 3 AM, which is of course a little before the Admin site came back online.

At about 1:30 AM I got a call on my cell from Chris Gillon, and a few txt messages after that. I ended up getting Classifieds online, and a quick note about publishing late, before I headed home from a long day in the newsroom.

Footer Issues Persist in CP5

2009-03-02T21:31:53Z

So, I wrote about this the other day. I believe we have published in CP5 three times now, and each time we get a broken footer that we need to email Lara to fix. When you publish an article in CP5, and then re-edit it, it likes to revert to draft state, we now know this.

But even keeping an eagle eye on the Draft check box did not stop it from happening again today when Craig put the day's articles online.

Three papers, three times messed up footer. This is not going to last, it is getting very frustrating. Why on Earth CP5 likes to set an already published article to draft is beyond me. I mean god forbid we edit an article after we publish it.

The problem lies, as I am told, when a once published article is set to draft, but still "live" on the site, meaning in a teaser, an article list, or category list, etc. This system has many really odd ways of handling things, and handling drafts is one of them.

Allow me to explain how Movable Type works. If you change the status of an article to Draft in Movable Type, the index(s) are rebuilt and the article no longer shows "live" on the site. In fact it is no longer accessible if you type in the explicit URL.

Yet another annoying "feature" of CP5. Lesson: beware of draft status after you publish an article.

Helpful Hints While Working in CP5

2009-02-27T05:44:52Z

CP5, or Polopoly, has a lot of quarks. Hell, Movable Type has a lot of quarks. I will be using this post to document them as best as I can. This is more for my staff at The BG News, but may be useful for anyone else who is working with CP5.
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If you create a Teaser element, then change the article's copy after you make said Teaser, you must delete the Teaser element and recreate it. The Teaser does not seem to update.

CP5 handles the way the main RSS and section RSS feeds work very oddly. I will cover this in its own post, and link to it here.

You cannot use Safari. I have no problem with this as I really dislike it. But a lot of people use Safari. A lot of the functionality of Polopoly works only in Firefox (or IE I assume, but I don't work on a Windows). The latest issue I have found was an editor tried to make edits to an existing article in Safari and when they saved, his changes were not.

Every night between 9 and 9:30 PM EST there is scheduled server maintenance. This brings the admin interface for CP5 to a screeching halt, or just gives you a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable. This may affect you like it did us this week, as we needed to post some breaking news shortly after 9 PM, and could not.

I will add more as I come across them/remember them. If any of these are wrong, I will delete them. Some of these may just be because I am not doing something the way CP5 wants me to do it.

What You Cannot Do in CP5

2009-02-27T05:30:32Z

There are a lot of things that I cannot do in CP5, some are much more annoying than others. I plan on updating this post with these things, as both a reminder and a constant reminder of what needs improved for College Publisher to truly have a solid CMS. In many respects, CP5 is a major step back from CP4.
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I cannot edit the of the document. This means I cannot add favicons, apple touch icons, javascript libraries, meta tags. lots of stuff I should be able to. You could do this in CP4.

You cannot hide sub-navigation items in the tree of your site. Main items, such as Forums, can be hidden from the top nav bar. But something under Our Views cannot be hidden. This was not necessarily possible in CP4 as the structure is completely different, but you could chose which sections to include in a new issue...

Newspaper issues do not exist in CP5 at all. This brings with it a lot of problems. For example, archive indexes do not exist in CP5 either, they do in every other CMS I have worked on. To make an issue index I have to do this manually.

Error documents are not supported. I cannot use a custom error 404 page at all. Please look at the putrid color and non-descript nature of this 404 page on bgviews.com. This is absolutely horrible when considering we just switched domains from bgnews.com to bgviews.com. You do not know what site it is, anything. Error 404 pages were possible in CP4.

More to come, and believe me there is more. When it gets longer I will organize it.

Editing Artcles Multiple Times

2009-02-25T22:38:55Z

I had really wanted to start off writing about mtvU with an informational post about College Publisher, and CP5.

That is not to say that this is not informational: If you edit an article multiple times, it will revert to Draft, and if that draft is referenced in a Teaser, it will break your layout, badly. Take a look at this FUBAR footer.

This has happened a lot today, on the day we are going live in CP5. Why an article would revert to draft is beyond me, but it does - and it is really pissing me off.

EDIT: Chase tells me the footer looks FUBAR too. It seems like it breaking the DIV or something on a Mac. From Chase:

Click both images to embiggen. In other new, Craig tells me the footer is FUBAR on his Windows PC. For the record, every night we have published in CP5, which is four now, the footer has screwed up and something is done when we email mtvU. I don't know about you, but I would sure like to know what that something is. Craig, and myself, have searched through the articles looking for Drafts.

FWIW the footer looks fine for me in FF 3.0.5 and IE7 on Windows XP.