Author Archive

Set up in the EI The first thing to do is to set up a self-serve section under Taxonomy (Admin -> Taxonomy). You can list all of the different pages here, each page needs its own unique taxonomy ID. In this example, I created a root category called SELF_SERVE_PAGES. I added the different types of […]

December 15, 2013

Blog

Intro I’ve worked on many CCE implementations with complex hierarchies built into the CCE types metadata. We want to push the user to select the proper values based on the hierarchy. This is a better UX and eliminates human error which also can shorten the time someone in the newsroom needs to properly categorize a […]

December 5, 2013

Blog

Saxotech contains many different ways to format text output in an object file. What does this mean exactly? Well, for example, the other day I noticed a page layout was broken on a client’s newslist page. The editor had added an iframe tag that was getting output in a <%Summary%> variable in a newslistitem.pbo file. […]

November 23, 2013

Blog

Oh, documentation: The first thing that gets cut when timelines shorten, the last things developers want to write, and the first thing we need when picking up a new project or joining a new team.   There are always extremes. The minimalist says, “The code IS the documentation.” On the other extreme is the developer […]

November 13, 2013

Blog

SERVER SIDE I attended the Saxotech Conference in 2012 and went to a workshop called Effective Template Design. My goal for attending this conference was to find a way to speed up my client’s sites. Their code had been written by another developer and my goal at the time was to take this code and […]

November 1, 2013

Blog

I try to stay active in the comments sections on Saxotech’s wiki. Whenever I learn something new or find something in the docs that didn’t work exactly right, I post it in the comments. I appreciate when other developers in the Saxotech/Newscycle community do this, so I try to keep an active conversation going there. […]

October 21, 2013

Blog

Twitter API v1 vs. v1.1 Adding a twitter widget to a site used to be a pretty straightforward task. It involved adding a Twitter provided script, with some javascript that would allow you to customize the look and feel of the widget. It looked something like thisThen, Twitter decided to completely change their API and […]

October 12, 2013

Blog

NEWSCYCLE Digital/Saxotech has informed you that you are scheduled for their newest upgrade. From our experience the process usually allows for testing the upgrade in the dev and stage environment before it is pushed live. If you were like me, you would check out your dev and stage sites, click around and think, “yep, its […]

September 26, 2013

Blog

Many saxotech tags output a list of objects: newslist, contentlist, links, etc. The object files that create the markup for those tags have a concept of a wrapper object file and item object file. For example, the newlist tag’s wrapper file is news.pbo and its item object file is newsitem.pbo. newsitem.pbo creates the markup for […]

September 20, 2013

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