Establishing Editing and Graphic Limitations


The remaining role settings concern the content of the page. Many of the choices found here must be filtered through the overall design philosophy of the site. For example, many (but certainly not all) designers are basing their sites on CSS; if your site is CSS based, you'll set the role options one way; if your site is oriented more toward tables and font tags, you'll make other choices. The options you choose affect both the Contribute user experience and the code that's inserted.

In this exercise, you'll become familiar yourself with the various editing and styling options available. The choices made here are based on the standards and CSS-oriented, template-based design direction of the sample site: Bounty General. As before, you must be in an Administrator role to begin.

1.

Choose Edit > My Connections. In the My Connections dialog box, select the PublishingServices server entry; click Disable. When you see the red slash through both the Publishing Services server and the Design_Deploy site, click Enable. In the Log in toPublishing Services dialog box, enter your user name in the Username field and enter designdeploy in the Password field; click OK. After the Role in the My Connections dialog box changes to Administrator, click Close.

Let's start by looking at the options in the Editing category.

2.

In Contribute, choose Edit > Administer Websites > Design_Deploy. While in the Users and Roles category, select HR Manager and then click Edit Role Settings. Switch to the Editing category. In the General Editing Restrictions area, make sure that the "Allow unrestricted editing" option is chosen along with "Protect scripts and forms"; the optionthat prevents users from inserting images should be unchecked. Under Paragraph Spacing,choose the "Two lines…" option. In the Other Editing Options section, check the "Require ALT text for images (improves website accessibility)" and "Use <strong> and <em> in place of <b> and <i>" options; leave the others unselected. Keep the Line Break Type list set to Windows (CR LF).

The Editing category is important for providing a general editing parameter and controlling the code output by Contribute. At first glance, you might assume that allowing unrestricted editing gives the Contribute user too much control. This would be true if Dreamweaver templates were not used throughout the site. However, because templates are used to protect navigation, headers, and other noneditable content, you don't have to allow only text editing and formatting. Doing so would unnecessarily hamper Contribute users from adding the range of content they need to include: Users so restricted, for example, can't add a new image or tablethey can only modify text. Also, unrestricted editing is modified by the choice to protect scripts and forms. This option keeps any server-side code, as well as all form-related tags, from being altered or inadvertently deleted.

Given that our directive is to work with CSS, you might think that the Paragraph Spacing option that uses CSS inline styles would be the appropriate selection. The reality is that the "One line…" option uses CSS to simulate the default setting for most word processors, and the "Two line…" option is more fitting for HTML. Although this choice might take a bit of getting used to from some users' perspectives, the idea is to make the Web pages easier to modify and style.

The options to allow users to edit Web page sources and insert third-party objects should be reserved for those in the Administrator or Web page design role. I prefer not to allow multiple consecutive spaces because it can lead to misuse of the hard space (&nbsp;)although not having the option might frustrate some word processingoriented users. The two options you did select were both chosen to keep within the site's design philosophy. Requiring ALT tags is a necessity to meet accessibility standards, and using the contextual <strong> and <em> tags instead of <bold> and <i> tags is important for the code to validate against HTML standards.

The type of line break chosen depends on the host server; the choices are between Windows, Linux, and Macintosh servers.

3.

Switch to the Styles and Fonts category; make sure that the Style Support list is set to Document-level CSS. Check the option "Allow users to apply styles (displays the Style menu)," along with "Include HTML heading styles (<h1>, …in the Style menu)" and "Include CSS styles in the Style menu." Select the "Show only CSS styles included in this CSS file" option and then click Choose. In the Choose File on Website dialog box, expand the site root first and then the css folder. Select bg_filter.css and click OK. Uncheck both the "Allow users to apply fonts and sizes (displays the Font and Size menus)" and the "Allow users to apply font color and background color" options. Check "Allow users to apply bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and fixed width styles."

The Styles and Fonts category determines the formatting possibilities open to users in the current role. Almost every choice affects the Contribute edit mode user interface; for example, if you disable the ability to apply fonts and sizes, the user doesn't see drop-down lists with those options.

The Style Support list box at the top of the category determines which other options are available in this area. Choose "Don't allow users to create styles," and all the rest of the choices are removed. Select HTML tags and specify the ability to select the size unit of measurement (pixels, points, ems, and so on). To maintain a bit more flexibilityand to keep within our CSS guidelinesI recommend that you choose Document-level CSS from the Style Support list.

It's important that you generally allow users to apply styles and at the same time control which styles they are offered. By enabling both HTML heading styles and custom CSS styles in the Style menu, you're allowing users to format their pages correctly with the look and feel you design. As discussed at some length in Lesson 4, the CSS filter file is a great tool for targeting styles for your Contribute users.

The flip side of permitting CSS styles is limiting the selection to approved styles. The two options you've disabledwhich together would have allowed users to change fonts, sizes, and colorare both potentially capable of misuse. The designer should think through cases in which users might want to change font characteristics and create appropriate styles. Some examples used in the Bounty General site are a pull-quote style, a legal disclaimer style, and a first paragraph style. Then why was the option to apply text styles (bold, italic, etc.) okay to enable? When text is formatted with any of these options, Contribute adds the appropriate HTML tag (such as <strong>, <em>, and <strike>) rather than creating a new style and applying it with a <span> tag.

4.

Click the Shared Assets category. Click the Add button and select Library Item from the drop-down list; then select HelpDesk.lbi from the Choose Library Item dialog box. Click OK to confirm your choice. When Contribute notes that you can prevent users from editing this shared asset by changing the Folder/File Access settings, click OK. When the Shared Assets Properties dialog box appears, change the contents of the Name field to Help Desk and select the "Lock item on page" option. Click OK to close this dialog box. Leave the "Use this list for all roles" option checked.

As covered in Lesson 3, shared assets are an important resource for passing design elements from the designer to the Contribute user. I recommend locking all shared items against editingDreamweaver library items, Flash movies, and graphics alike. Because these elements are potentially shared on many different pages, it's important that they be modified only by the designer, if at all.

Note

You might be wondering why this asset isn't already listed, because the same library item was designated as a shared asset previously. Some settings, including the shared assets, were lost when CPS was enabled.

5.

Switch to the New Images category. Leave the "Enable Contribute image processing when inserting images" option turned on, and choose "Reject images that exceed max file size." Change the Max File Size to 75. Click OK to close the Edit "HR Manager" Settings dialog box, and then Close to dismiss the Administer Website dialog box.

Contribute includes a basic image-processing engine that allows users to rescale, crop, and otherwise modify inserted graphics. Keeping in mind that any change to the image alters the uploaded graphic, I recommend that you enable this feature for those in managerial roles. Although I believe that the automatic resizing feature can be safely lifted for such a role, I also think it's a good idea to enforce this restriction for those on the assistant level. The maximum file size statistic is more vital from a Web page perspective. Given that the bulk of HR information is intended for internal use, it's safe to increase the maximum file size to 75 kilobytes.

You're ready to test our new HR Manager style settings; all you need to do is log in with the appropriate user name and password.

6.

Choose Edit > My Connections. In the My Connections dialog box, select the Publishing Services server entry and click Disable; click Enable to reopen a connection. When the Log in to Publishing Services dialog box appears, enter ppublish in the Username field and publish in the Password field; click OK. After the role in the My Connections dialog box changes to HR Manager, click Close.

Let's take a brief tour of the edit mode interface to verify the settings.

7.

From the Pages panel, choose Employee Records Safeguards, previously saved as a draft. Note that the font list, font size list, font, and background color choices are no longer available. Click the Style list and verify that only the custom CSS styles and HTML heading styles are there. Place your cursor at the beginning of the text and choose Image > From My Computer. Navigate to the Design_Deploy site and choose beaty_large.jpg in the images folder. When Contribute informs you that the image is larger than the limit set by the Administrator, click OK. Again, choose Image > From My Computer and choose beaty_small.jpg from the images folder. When the Image Description dialog box appears, enter the text: Judith Beaty, HR Policy Director and then click OK. With the newly placed image selected, verify that the image-modification controls are available. Click Cancel; when Contribute asks whether you want to lose the draft, click Yes.

Settings take place immediately upon the user's entry into Contribute. You'll probably need to fine-tune the settings over time to get the right balance of control and flexibility.



Design and Deploy Websites with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute 3(c) Training from the Source
Design and Deploy Websites with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute 3: Training from the Source
ISBN: 032128884X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 130
Authors: Joseph Lowery

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