Special thanks to Fabien Sanglier for giving me the idea for the title of this blog feature (where’d he come up with such a catchy line!?). Indeed, the WCI Portal has a ton of APIs that allow extensions and customizations, and there are dozens of products, code samples, and utilities that have been developed using them; if you can dream it, there no doubt IS an app for that. The trick is finding it.
I’ll use this feature to showcase some of ‘em (admittedly, in a somewhat self-serving way). Most will be products I’m offering or interesting throwaway apps Integryst has developed to share some ideas with you, but I am on the lookout for cool apps created by others to feature here as well.
Today’s feature is PublisherEditor 3.1, a product I’ve written over the past year that includes many features not available in the out-of-the-box Publisher Content Item Editor, resolving common issues with the out-of-the-box version of Publisher such as:
- Pasting content from Microsoft Word is possible without corrupting the styles
- Check-outs, saves, check-ins, and publishing are performed in one click, and all version history capabilities that Publisher provides are still available
- Styles in the rich editor are the same as the page, so there’s no guess-work on what the content will look like when it’s published
- Dynamically define styles, fonts, and sizes as you deem appropriate to prevent “style sprawl”
- Page anchor links can be created and won’t be broken on save/checkin
- Users don’t have to go from the HTML editor to the rich text editor to actually save content (a Publisher 6.5 bug)
- Images can be uploaded and actually viewed in the editor; gatewaying, relative links, and adaptive tags such as pt://images aren’t broken.
- Adaptive tags are not broken and are actually enhanced (rather than seeing XML you see formatted text)
- The HTML DOM won’t be corrupted when you’re updating the HTML
- Previews can be viewed in-line on the actual page the item will appear on
- Link to other communities, pages, and portlets by selecting them in a simple dialog box – no more copying links!
- Easily upload and link to files/documents for quick inclusion in the item
- In-line spell checker like Microsoft Word
- Browse existing images and files and quickly link to them
- Automatically refresh portlet caches so publishing items results in the content actually being updated
- Search, Replace, and more!
Take a look at the below video for more information, hit up the product page, and contact me if you’d like a Live Demo!