The Orange Blog

We at DynamiX stay busy juggling many tasks, including bringing on new clients, working on and completing existing projects, and providing help to our clients with live sites. If a client requests a feature that would make their SE Content Management System experience richer or more effective, we see this as an opportunity to improve the system for everyone.

In the majority of situations, our SE system has a feature or function that can handle their need already, and we simply make a few tweaks and show the client how to use their new feature. But, on occasion we find an opportunity to simplify the system; or conversely, we may find an opportunity to add an entirely new feature to the system.

Because the SE Content Management System always has and always will be developed in house, we are intimately familiar with the inner workings of the code and database of the system. This means that we have complete control over layout and features of the system, big or small. One of the main goals of the SE Content Management System is to provide you, the site owner, with the easiest possible way to control your site, so if an idea for an improvement isn’t simpler and easier than the existing system, then it isn’t an improvement and the idea gets scrapped (or heavily revised).

With that said, we’d like to share with you some of our recent updates to the SE Content Management System. This month, we have focused heavily on improving our extremely popular “Listings” system. Our goal was to add more features while keeping the system just as user friendly. So, we’d like to briefly list some of the new features we have added to the listings system:

• Full control over the order of listings. Previously, listings could be ordered by their title (alphabetically) or in the order which they were created. Now, SE users are able to change the order of these listing using the same familiar system used to change the order of links in the site menu.
• Full control over the order of listing images. Pictures on each listing page can now be sorted in any order you wish.
• Full control over the titles of your attributes. Attributes can be used for nearly anything. For example: a used car dealership could use them to define a cars: Make, Model, Year, Color and Mileage; a real estate agent could use them to list a homes location, number of bedrooms and baths, price and MLS number. Or, if you prefer, the attributes could simply be used as bullet points. In the past, these attributes could only be changed by us, but now, we’ve created a system that lets you change them any time you want. And, as a bonus, we’ve made it possible to have anywhere from 0 to 10 attributes. If you want to hide an existing attribute, simply don’t give it a title and it will disappear.
• Video Integration. Just like our standard content pages, you can now integrate a video (YouTube or otherwise) directly into your listings, without having to write a line of code. Simply add the link to your video and we’ll take care of the rest.We’ve also made some more behind-the-scenes changes to the SE Framework that make your experience even easier; like improving the file upload system to ensure that file names with special characters or spaces get automatically fixed so that they display properly on your site.

If you are an existing customer and have an idea to make the system even better, please let us know! We look forward to your feedback.

1: Use ‘tabs’ in your browser.
“Tabbed Browsing” is a feature found in the newest versions of major browsers like Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 2 (both browsers are supported by the SE Content Management System). Even though these features exist, many users have never seen or used them. Using tabs lets you quickly switch between viewing the SE Content Management System of your site and the site itself. This means you can make a change to the text of a page, hit update, click over to your site and hit refresh to see how the change looks on the page. If you are editing your site in SE and have not opened the site itself, you can click the “Preview Page” button and the page will automatically open in a new tab (if you have your preferences set properly).

To set your Firefox preferences to automatically open links in a new tab:

• Select “Options” from the “Tools” menu. (Mac OS Users can select “Preferences” from the “Firefox” menu.
• Click on “Tabs”
• For the “New pages should be opened:” dialog, select “a new tab”
• To open a new tab, select “New Tab” from the “File” menu or use the (Ctrl T) key combination.

In Internet Explorer 7, tabbed browsing is enabled by default. To open a new tab, click on the small blank tab to the far right or use the (Ctrl T) key combination.

2: Add commonly edited pages to your favorites
If you find yourself making changes to a particular page or adding images to a gallery in the SE System frequently, then adding a those pages to your Favorites (or Bookmarks) can save time. Lets say, for example, that you used the SE Listings Module to display your most recent projects, and you found yourself adding a new project on a weekly basis. If you added the Listings Editor page to your IE7 Favorites or FireFox Bookmarks, you could quickly return to that page directly.

3: Organize the images on your hard drive before you start to create image galleries
You can add an image gallery to any page within the SE Content Management System by simply uploading images to with the SE Pictures system. Sometimes, however, we have found that our customers lose their ‘momentum’ because they spent too much time looking for a certain picture on their hard drive. While we believe that the SE Pictures system is the easiest around, the process can be frustrating if you cannot find the pictures that you need. So, to make your life easier, we recommend that you keep pictures of all of your projects in their own individual folders in the ‘pictures’ folder of your hard drive.

4: Use the integrated “Back Arrows” in the SE CMS

Navigating through previous generations of our content management systems was easy, but we found a way to make it even easier. We added “Back Arrows” into all of our pages. For example, when you are finished uploading new images to a new (or existing) image gallery and you want to return to the content manager, you can simply press the “Back Arrow” and you will jump back to the Content Manager, regardless of what page you were on previously.
This works with our SE Upgrades too. Whether you are uploading something in the Customer Files Module or publishing a breaking story in the the News Module, simply click the “Back Arrow” and you will be taken back to the home page of that module.

5: Write your content directly into the SE Page Editor
Ever hear the phrase “Cut out the middle man”?

Ever think you would hear it said about your website?
Well here it is: Cut out the middle man!
When you are working on creating a new page for your site, instead of opening up your favorite word processing program to type out your thoughts, simply create a new page in the SE Content Management system and start typing. Your page will not show up in the sites menu until you click the ‘add to menu’ button, so you dont have to worry about visitors seeing your incomplete work. By working directly in the editor, you save time and the headache of copying and pasting large amounts of text. While word processors, like Microsoft Word, are extremely capable, they use some characters and symbols that cannot be displayed properly on websites. While the SE Content Editor has a MS Word import tool that helps to convert as much as it possibly can, working directly in the editor is clearly the most efficient way to work. If you add an image into Word and work hard to position it as you want it, you will have to repeat the exercise by uploading the picture using the picture wizard and reposition it. Working directly in the editor allows you to save your work online and therefore work on it from any computer with an internet connection. Why create extra work for yourself? Cut out the middle man! To learn more about the SE Page Editor, visit about-se.com.

6: Make sure that your images are appropriately sized for the web
Modern digital cameras are able to take pictures that are in excess of 10 megapixels. A 10 megapixel image is 4 to 5 times larger than the average computer screen and would take several minutes to download on a slower internet connection. Pictures directly from these cameras are completely impractical for use with the web and need to be resized first. The SE Content Management System has been designed to ensure that you don’t accidentally upload an image that is too large to download and view quickly by the average site visitor. This means that if you try to add an image from your digital camera, without resizing it, you will be told to first resize the image and try again.

So, to avoid any frustrations, make sure that your images are suitable for the web. We recommend:

• The largest file size for a single image should be 500kb
• The largest width for a single image should be 800 pixels
• To resize an image on your computer: read our help guide on about-se.com

7: Don’t work hard, work smart!
Do you have a great idea for a page, but dont want visitors to see it until a specific time? Do you want to have a page on your site for a limited time (perhaps a sale or seasonal offering), but plan on being out of town or super-busy taking care of your customers? If so, then the Page Publisher module is perfect for you. The Page Publisher allows you to create exactly what you want and make it visible to site visitors exactly when you want. The Page Publisher is our newest upgrade, and if I can say so myself, its pretty cool. Find out more about the Page Publisher on about-se.com.

DynamiX Web Design, LLC is proud to announce the completion of a new optional module in the SE Content Management System: Page Publisher. The new module is available as an upgrade to any new or existing SE powered website. Simply put, Page Publisher allows you to schedule when any page will be visible to site visitors, in a number of scenarios.

You may, for example, want to create a page discussing the addition of new services, a new employee or a sale, but you don’t want that page to be visible until the announcement has been finalized and made public. In this scenario, you would write the content of your page today, but set the “Publish Date” to the day of the big announcement. In this case, the page will appear automatically on that day, without needing any further input from you.

Or, you may want to create a page that discusses your seasonal project, or possibly a short term sale. In a situation like this, you would want that page to disappear from your site after the applicable period is over; and all you would have to do is set the “Expire Date” to whatever that date may be. The Page Publisher even allows you to set both the Publish and Expire dates, giving you the freedom to show your site visitors what you want when you want it. To make it just as simple as possible, the Page Publisher includes a pop-up calendar, allowing you to browse month-by-month to find the exact publish and/or expiration date.

We’re taking this feature even further!

We liked the Page Publisher so much that have also decided to implement a similar, and just as intuitive system into our News Module as an included (standard) feature. With the News Module, you can set the default lifetime of an article, and the system automatically calculates when that page should expire (and disappear from your site) based on the News Preferences. However, if you have a news article that you want to delay publishing or remain active for a different amount of time, you can use the News Publisher in the exact same way as the Page Publisher. Now that’s consistency.

Learn more about the new SE Page Publisher.