Contribute Tips and Tricks

From WolfWikis

This page is intended to be a collection spot for all the College of Natural Resources Adobe Contribute users. Hopefully you will find something useful here, and maybe you'll even add something yourself? As always, if you need help please contact cnr_help@ncsu.edu (if you are a CNR employee) all others should email help@ncsu.edu.

Best Practices

Don't create new styles

We don't want our sites to look like a ransom note do we? Mismatched fonts and styles create problems for sites both aesthetically and in the area of site efficiency (read as "load time").

What's okay:

• Using HTML tags like Normal and Heading 1-6. These tags are your friend, please stick with them.
• Using already defined styles from the style chooser.
• Bold and Italic can be used just fine.
• Feel free to create lists of the ordered and unordered variety
• Insert links is okay too
• Images are fine
• Tables are great with this caveat: Do not use them for layout! Only use them for depicting tabular data.

What is not at all okay

• Adjusting the font color, the font size, the font type manually through Contribute. This is a big "no no".

In general just try and stick with what the site already has defined, that way we can have a friendly, aesthetically pleasing and efficient site.

Add metadata to your page

• Your page will be found easier by search engines if you provide good metadata to describe your page. To do this in Contribute you just have to enter a comma separated list. See the following screen shots to learn how:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Add breadcrumbs

Most pages in the CNR domain have what are known as "breadcrumbs" see the breadcrumbs circled below.

When adding new pages you must make sure to update the breadcrumbs section. Breadcrumbs tell a user where they have been and where they are right now. It is a form of navigating through a site. Without accurate breadcrumbs users will not be able to rely on their usefulness throughout the site.

Adding links to internal pages

When you add a link to an internal page it is always better to "Browse" or "Choose" the file you are looking for in the Insert Link window. This is always better than typing in the URL to avoid potential mis-match issues (See [1])

Naming Convention Rules

Always title every page following naming conventions

• Every page that you create should have a descriptive title that follows a certain naming convention. This is for a few reasons: 1. It allows search engines to find your page easier, 2. It gives organization to our site, 3. Provides context for users, 4. Titles are the default when you bookmark a page, 5. Folks who have visual impairments will benefit from a descriptive title. See http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_8_constructing_meaningful_page_titles.html for more info. Here is the general naming convention for titles:

"Main Home Page Title: Title of Current Page"

This might look like "College of Natural Resources: Alumni and Friends" or "Department of Wood and Paper Science: Faculty and Staff Directory"

Always use proper file names when creating new pages

• In general there a few guidelines to follow when creating new pages as far as what the actual file will be called.

 First: if you are starting a new folder/directory, the first page will always be "index.html" 

• This is so that this page will show up as the default when someone opens up the directory from a browser. Browsers know to always look for index.html when being directed to a directory.

 Second:  only use lower case letters, uppercase letters are not to be used

 Third:  do not use spaces, instead if you need to use a space you can use the underscore character ("_")

 Fourth:  try to keep file names relatively short, you can abbreviate when necessary.

• So a nice file name might be something like the following examples: optical.html, woodprodtech.html, etc.

Tips!

• To get the most out of the rollbacks feature, please make more than one change to a page at a time!

• Hit F12 or “File > Preview in browser” to view your draft as it will look published.

• If you are uploading an image or pdf, try to compress for use on the web. This will help reduce load time for people with slower internet connections.

• Please make it a habit to spell-check and correct the pages in your folder.

• Add ALT text to new/existing images.

• When inserting/checking links, use “Default” as the target frame if the page stays within the site (link will open within the same window); use “New Window” if the link goes outside of the site (including NCSU or other department pages).

• If you lose the left margin, use File > Save or Ctrl S to save the page and the margin will pop back into place – don’t ask me why…

• If you get a message that you cannot create links in a particular section of a page, you can get around this limitation by copying a link elsewhere in your page, paste where needed, edit it, and edit the link properties. I know this is a laborious fix – we’ll try to solve this problem soon.

Troubleshooting

Error: "Can't post because the system says that someone else is reviewing"

• "When I try to edit this page, Contribute warns me that someone else is reviewing a draft of that page. But, my draft console doesn’t show that any drafts are out. When I talked to the person who Contribute said was working on a draft he/she said that that was not the case"

It could be that the page became locked in this mode because a machine shut down in the middle of working in Contribute, or it could be something else going on. Either way, if this situation is happening to you, contact cnr_help@ncsu.edu and an administrator will assist.

Error: "You cannot edit this page because wasn't found on the website or it is a directory listing"

This is likely a result of some part of the URL not being acceptable to Contribute. Contribute can be finicky in what it will accept as a proper Web address. For example, in FER pages a general rule is to leave out the "www". As in this works:

 http://cnr.ncsu.edu/fer/grads/admiss.html

And this does not:

 http://www.cnr.ncsu.edu/fer/grads/admiss.html

Typically the safest way to ensure you are getting to the page you want to edit is to use the sites navigation. It is a good idea to fix any URLs you do find that are pointing to a resource that Contribute is having trouble finding.

Seeing lots of weird orange warning messages when I hit F12 to preview

This is something that will happen whenever you try to preview a page that ends in .php. So if you are working on a page that is enabled to work with TownCrier you will see this. As bad as it looks, you can safely ignore it, your page should be fine.