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Re-awakening of the Technology Geek with Squiz Suite

by Nick Peart

Responding to a JFK style "...ask what you can do for..." approach from our Squiz community advocate I submit a rambling recollection of our migration from MyMatrix to Squiz CMS. I assumed responsibility for the web site at Clearswift following the departure of our then Webmaster to pastures new in July 2010. We were using MyMatrix to power our three international sites and two partner portals which were seamlessly integrated with our back-office business systems. Getting to grips with templates and paint layers simply baffled me. Creating new content and delivering it across our various sites seemed to require an unusually detailed knowledge of the dark arts of code wizardry... or so I thought. I had forgotten everything I had ever known about HTML from previous use of Go-Live Cyber Studio and five years working at Adobe launching Creative Suite 1 to 3 and the integration of Macromedia. The...

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Riding shotgun with G.James

by Jaco Roeloffs

Last year we embarked upon a project to revamp & rejuvenate our aging website. Given our use of Squiz Matrix to run our intranet website we stuck with Matrix for our public website. G.James Glass & Aluminium is one of Australia's leading manufacturers of windows and doors servicing the residential commercial and high-rise building and construction markets. Shotguns G.James produces a wide range of Glass & Aluminium products and as such a significant number of assets had to be created to cover our whole product range. Once we had a handle on the number of Matrix assets we'd require we quickly realised it'd be very labour intensive to try and get everything done through the Matrix admin area so we came up with a few tools to aid us with some of the grunt work. For the initial creation of many of our pages we developed a few design...

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Squiz Matrix for iOS: An Update

by Nic Hubbard

The Background Story When I started work on building an iOS app for Squiz Matrix it was just a proof of concept to see if I could get the Matrix Asset Map to show up as a TableView. It turned out to be really easy which allowed for more ideas to creep in about how I could build a fully functional Squiz Matrix iOS app. Current Progress I have been working hard on this project committing time each day to try and get the beta version ready for testing.  Recently I have been finishing up the Metadata section of the app allowing users to preview and edit their asset metadata. The next features that I will be worked on are Moving Linking and Cloning an asset.  Right now this is invoked by pressing and holding on a row in the asset map.  This brings up an options menu which...

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The Birth of the JS API

by Nic Hubbard

It was June 17 2009 and I was working at Pacific Union College in the middle of a project that required me to build an interface for Department Newsletters. At the time I wanted to allow Department users to build their own newsletters and send them out to bulk mail lists. It was a complex system and I was running into problems because I required a great number of nested asset listings to retrieve the data that I was needing. After building complicated pages filled with multiple nested asset listings it occurred to me that there had to be a better way to do this. With this idea in mind I moved over to my development system to take a look deep into the code. I started out building a single .php file that lived in the _lib directory. It was a hacked together file that included some of the...

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Spreading the word Down Under

by Imogen Levy

Well I am honoured to participate as guest writer on the new Squiz Advocate blog after being bullied er I mean persuaded gently by Darren at the Squiz User Conference a couple weeks ago! I was very honoured to not only attend the conference in Sydney and to get to hear from a whole host of amazing speakers I was also able to present a case study of the work I do at here at Westminster Abbey in London on what has been a very exciting year! For those wishing to check it out the presentation has been added to the Squiz Youtube Channel. It was a great week and not just because it was my first time in Australia it was a hugely inspirational and idea generating conference and dancing till 3 am was pretty fun too! There was a wealth of great presentations and I think I...

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Come on in the water's lovely

by Charlotte Westney

Forums. They're a bit web 1.0. They don't have the social buzz of Twitter or Google+. But if recent web trends have shown me anything it's that there is no 'best' way to communicate you just need to pick the right place for the kind of conversation you want to have. And the Squiz forum for me is the right place to get support help ideas but mostly to really feel part of the Squiz community. I started using Matrix just over a year ago but I already feel like I 'know' some other Squizzies from around the world becauseof their help on the forum. Whenever I join a forum I delve about to get a feel for the kind of vibe is has and the Squiz forum has really impressed me. Not only can I post things at 5.30pm on my way out of the office and normally...

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No sleep till beta!

by Darren Langlands

I have an admission to make... things have been a little quiet on the advocate front since arriving back from Australia a few weeks back. Mea Culpa I’ve been a little busy… In what I believe is a first for the UK HE sector (I am willing to be set straight however) the University of Salford has today unveiled it’s new beta website at beta.salford.ac.uk. The old one’s still there for the moment but we’re encouraging visitors to check out our new brand and tell us what they think before we go to final release next month. The beta concept was something I was a bit wary of to be honest. I'm used to delivering websites that are finished and complete. But I do like the idea that we're being a little brave in expanding out our user testing in such a public way. I'm looking forward to reporting...

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Introducing your new Community Advocate

by Darren Langlands

It's been an amazing week! Let’s begin with some introductions. I’m Darren Langlands from the University of Salford in the UK and I am your new Squiz Community Advocate. My role at Salford is split fairly evenly between responsibility for CMS admin and marketing and communications activity. So I’m as at home working with high-level stakeholders to achieve business objectives as I am tweaking code with our developers. I am involved in a lot of stakeholder engagement at Salford and that’s probably what I enjoy most. It’s incredibly satisfying to go out to listen to users capture their requirements and work with colleagues Squiz UK and Funnelback to see those goals realised across our digital space. This year’s User Conference in Sydney was an absolute feast of ideas innovation and inspiration. Having the honour of being elected this year’s Squiz Community Advocate is the icing on an already sumptuous...

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Building a content preview system using SOAP

by Andrew Dunbar

There comes a point in any web development project where it is time to demonstrate the finished website to the client. The problem is how can you do this when your Matrix website is still under development and the clients don’t have access to your Matrix installation. Your choices can be; set the website to Live so that Public users can view the content. set the website to Live remove Public access and create User accounts within Matrix (or your Directory system) and grant those accounts Read access to the website Assets. leave the website assets with a status of Under-construction and create User accounts within Matrix (or your Directory system) and grant them Write access to the website Assets. The WebCMS Preview System is built around the third option and is designed for previewing unpublished content within a Matrix installation by enterprise users who are not granted access...

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Matrix: Paint Layouts

by Andrew Dunbar

This Matrix tip and trick is all about Paint Layouts. Whilst this information is helpful for new Matrix installations that have a smaller number of total assets and can still make this change early larger installations may also benefit from this lesson. My experience has been that Matrix back-end administrators commonly refer to Paint Layouts by their Asset ID. This is particularly true when regularly using a set of Paint Layouts for common Assets such as Standard Pages or News Items usually as Override Layouts. The problem can be that these Paint Layout IDs will become difficult to remember once a Matrix installation has a large number of total Assets. With an ever-growing number of Assets every new Paint Layout created will have a larger Asset ID which over time is harder to remember. For example: My tip for new installations is to initially create around fifty un-configured Paint...

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