Archive for July, 2008

Manually clearing your page cache

There are a number of reasons why clearing your page cache can be necessary, mostly during a development cycle where you’re repeatedly publishing out the same pages, or need a site wide change to take place. Normally this isn’t a proble, thanks to the nice “Clear page cache” button.
But sometimes it all becomes horribly stuck, timing [...]

When to use a country variant

No-one seems to be able to give us a straight answer for this question. Reddot are suitably vague and other agencies we’ve spoken to all have their own preferences for when to use it… so this is what we’ve worked out over time.
What is a language variant?
A language variant is a copy of your site, [...]

Naming conventions

Back in April Markus posted his element naming conventions. I think it’s time to reiterate this, by adding some of those we’ve been developing in UCB. And why.
When developing things it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you know what things mean, so everyone else should as well. Please. Remeber the developer coming in [...]

Using foundations for testing

Ok, so previously I covered some of the benefits of using a foundation project. I forgot to go into detail about how we plan to use the foundation for testing.
If you’ve set things up with all your templates in a foundation project and put all your content into a child project, you’re probably thinking that [...]

Clipboard publisher plugin

Frederic Hemberger has released his third plugin for Reddot. The text below was taken from his post on the Reddot google group
Plugin description:
Publishing multiple pages on different SmartTree nodes at once is a time-consiuming process, even if you already collected all necessary pages in the clipboard: Jump to the selected page, choose “Publish page”, choose [...]

Damn you cache!

Caches always seem to be causing trouble, or slowing down development of a website. There are a few things that can help you out :
XML & Flash
Have you ever come across an xml driven flash application that just will not update when you’ve uploaded changes?
Typing in the XML file location and forcing a refresh on that [...]

Speeding up your project in smartEdit

This little tip worked for speeding up our projects, so hopefully it will do the same for you.
Our stylesheets and script files had a lot of areas that we wanted to use placeholders for, such as variables, images or links to other script files. As such they were all created as content classes. Unfortunately this [...]

Have you cleared the page cache?

If you’re seeing Reddot doing something odd with your pages… clear your page cache and navigation cache (if you’re using navigation manager) first. We’ve seen too many instances of it being the sole problem.
The sort of things we have seen this resolve is blank pages, or asp code turning up when it should be pre-executing.

Setting the foundations

In any project you have to start somewhere and before anything else, even the naming schemes, the structure of your projects are always the most important thing to look at. You need to make sure you are going to be putting your projects together in a format that’s not going to cause you problems later [...]

You have to start somewhere…

We’ve now been working with Reddot for a year; what a hectic year it’s been!
From day one it felt like we’d been given a Sisyphean challenge. None of the projects were given the time we would have liked, but it’s probably this pressure that’s driven our development process and given us the drive to get [...]