Global Moxie

The “Kitsy Babcock” beta update marks the debut of Big Medium’s new library assistant for browsing and editing items in Big Medium’s media libraries.

Big Medium maintains libraries of all of the stuff that you stick to your site’s pages (images, documents, audio, video and people), making it easy to reuse media across pages and share materials with other site editors. The blog includes a feature preview of the new library assistant, but briefly, the new library assistant lets you:

• Batch-upload files to the server (individually or via zip file)
• Edit and delete library items
• Search library items
• Hide/display items in the library.
• Choose whether your library items are shared or private.

The updates also adds several changes and bug fixes, listed a bit further below.

Important update info

If you’re updating from a previous version... This update contains a considerable number of JavaScript updates, some of which may not be updated in your browser by a simple page refresh.

Before running the update script, please follow these browser update instructions.

After you complete the update, you should also have all of your organization’s editors follow those same browser update instructions.

Hit the books

Download the latest version of Big Medium here.

The download package includes installation instructions, including info for upgrading from previous versions of the Big Medium 2 beta. (If you’re upgrading from 2.0b30 or later, see the shortcut instructions below.)

The Nitty Gritty

In addition to the library assistant, here’s what’s new in this update:

Changes and New Features

• Streamlined Big Medium’s JavaScript plumbing, making Big Medium’s interface feel peppier.

• Faster fetching of library items.

• Improved HTML clean-up for the rich-text editor, including a new “paste from Word” button that can help to clean up formatting imported from other applications.

• The default printer-friendly page now displays pullquotes, images, etc, albeit with very limited formatting.

• Overhauled progress bars to work with windows IIS servers and for better reliability and speed overall.

• The rich-text editor now always inserts a paragraph (two line breaks) when you type Enter in all browsers (not just Internet Explorer). To add a single line break, type Shift-Enter.

• Added “Show all accounts” and changed “Edit Accounts” to “Search Accounts” in Accounts menu for webmasters and admins.

• Smarter detection of the NetPBM graphics library to know whether your server supports thumbnailing of images.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that caused crash when try to edit an article authored by a deleted account.

• Fixed bug that caused centering problems in Internet Explorer 7 for sites with dropdown menus.

• Fixed bug that caused unnecessary clicks in Internet Explorer when initializing the dropdown menus.

• Fixed problem that could cause CSS style settings to fail to save under certain conditions.

• Addressed Safari bug in CSS editor that prevented the display from updating after clearing custom styles.

• Fixed bug that prevented the edit screen from loading properly for pages with pullquotes or captions containing script tags.

• Fixed bug that caused empty image tags to be inserted when a requested image size was not available (generally an issue only for servers without ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM or Imager installed).

• Fixed bug that prevented lightbox image enlargement from working properly for images entered as URLs instead of file uploads.

• Fixed a bug that caused Big Medium’s paragraph counter (for pullquotes, images, etc) to be off by one under certain formatting conditions.

• Fixed bug that mishandled underscores in title field of image/document/media edit forms.

• Fixed bug that prevented drag-n-drop order changes for authors from being saved on edit screen.

• Fixed bug under Safari that prevented status text from appearing in progress bars in Safari.

• Fixed JavaScript error when adding/editing media, pullquotes and other “attachment” items in the edit screen.

• Fixed bug in section structure screen that could cause error messages (e.g. “That slug name already exists”) to linger after the add/edit form is removed.

• Fixed style bug in Safari that caused text in some confirmation dialogs to be partially obscured by the OK and Cancel buttons.

• Fixed a handful of minor layout issues in Internet Explorer 6 where buttons jutted out of their containing box.

• Fixed a bug under Safari that could cause the directory-checker on the site URL/directory preference screen from falsely saying that the directory is incorrect after making changes to the directory path.

Upgrading from 2.0b30 or later?

If you’re upgrading from v2.0b30 or later, you can update to the new version by following the instructions below.

Update bmadmin/index.html

Inside the bmadmin directory, locate the file named index.html. In a text editor like Notepad or BBEdit, open the index.html file in the bmadmin directory on your local hard drive. You must update two URLs in this file to reflect locations on your web server. The domain names that you use should be the same as the ones you use in the “Settings>Big Medium Server Info” screen.

The first URL is marked with this comment in the file:

*******************************************************************
UPDATE THE “ACTION” URL TO POINT TO THE DOMAIN WHERE BIG MEDIUM IS
INSTALLED. FOR EXAMPLE:
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-login.cgi/login-verify
*******************************************************************

and again:

*******************************************************************
UPDATE THE “HREF” URL TO POINT TO THE DOMAIN WHERE BIG MEDIUM IS
INSTALLED. FOR EXAMPLE:
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-login.cgi/login-reminder
*******************************************************************

Upload in “plain text” or “ASCII” FTP mode:

• moxiebin/bm-library.cgi (Unix: set permissions to 0755)
• moxiebin/Modules/BigMed.pm
• moxiebin/Modules/BigMed (directory and contents)
• moxiedata/templates (directory and contents)

Upload in “binary” or “automatic” FTP mode:

• moxiedata/support/assets (directory and all contents)
• bmadmin (directory and all contents)

Clear browser cache

Before running the updater, please follow these browser update instructions.

Run the updater

Browse to the bm-update.cgi file in your site’s moxiebin directory. For example:

http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-update.cgi

Ask other editors to clear browser cache

Please ask all of your site’s Big Medium editors to follow the browser update instructions.