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What's Global Moxie?

Global Moxie is the hypertext laboratory of Josh Clark, whose projects include the Big Medium web content management system. Josh creates web applications and websites from his multimedia studio in Paris, France.

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Big Medium is flexible, easy-to-use server software for creating and editing websites directly from your browser. Check out the features or download now.

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Big Medium 2.0b50: "Paper Trail"

Posted Jul 9, 2007

The “paper trail” beta update adds basic version control to Big Medium 2, letting you retrace the text-edit history of any page. Plus: “news gadgets” let visitors add auto-updating links to your content on their own sites, and one-click editing gives you fast access to editing options from your published site.

Edit history

Big Medium now saves every revision that you make to a page’s text and lets you review the page’s edit history, comparing the current text to previous versions. Clicking a version link on the page’s edit screen shows the changes made since that version; deletions are highlighted in red, additions in green.

Screenshot - Edit history comparison
Compare current text to a previous version.

If you decide that you prefer the earlier version, just click the “revert to the previous version” link. The old text replaces the current version in the editor.

News gadgets

A gadget (sometimes called a widget or badge) is a snippet of code that you offer site visitors to allow them to display your latest links on their own sites. (This is the feature formerly known as “JavaScript News Feeds.”)

The gadget-builder page features a simple form to let your visitors customize the gadget display and pick up their gadget code. The new <%newsgadget%> widget links to the gadget-builder page.

Screenshot - Gadget-builder form
The gadget-builder form.

One-click editing

One-click editing lets you jump into editing from any page on the published site. If enabled, the feature adds links on every page allowing you to add a new page or go straight to the edit screen for the current page.

These links are shown only to editors; they are not visible to the general public.

Screenshot - One-click editing
One-click editing links appear above the main page text.

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.

After 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.

Go get it

Download the latest version of Big Medium here.

The download package includes complete installation instructions, including notes along the way for upgrading from previous versions of the Big Medium 2 beta.

Shortcut instructions for upgrading from 2.0b45 or later are provided below. (If you’re upgrading from versions earlier than 2.0b45, please follow the instructions in the download package’s installation guide.)

The Nitty Gritty

Here’s what’s new in this update:

New features and changes

  • New versioning feature lets you review a page’s edit history, compare the current page text to previous versions and revert to the text from any previous version. To compare the current text to a previous version, click that version’s link in the left column of the page’s edit screen.

  • “News gadgets” allow your visitors code to display links to your latest content on their own site.

    • The <%newsgadget%> widget displays a link to your site’s gadget-builder page; this widget is now part of the default news feed template.

    • Preferences for the news gadget may be set by going to “Settings>News Gadget Preferences.”

  • The new “one-click editing” feature gives editors links at the top of page content to take you directly to the edit screen for the current page, or to create a new page.

    • Edit links are not visible to the general public, only to editors.

    • To activate these links in your browser, click the “One-click editing” link in the left column of the control panel.

  • The rich-text editor now highlights spelling errors in Firefox. (CTRL-right-click to see the spelling suggetions; for Mac, CMD-CTRL-click.)

  • Interactive widgets on published pages (including slideshows, dropdown menus, comment fields) activate sooner than they previously did.

  • The <%tags%> widget now presents tags in alphabetical order.

  • RSS feeds and news gadgets are now turned off by default for new subsections when adding sections in the section layout screen (new main sections still have them turned on).

  • The section layout screen now checks if you really want to browse away if you have unsaved changes in section order.

  • When you save changes to a site’s main urls/directories, you’re now taken directly to the rebuild-pages menu.

  • The rich-text editor no longer strips out embed, param or img tags from the source HTML when you save.

  • Switched back to using Helvetica on Windows browsers (in the end, Candara just isn’t readable enough at small sizes).

  • Error messages are now more helpful and descriptive when you upload an image with an unsupported file type.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed bug that can cause edit menu to display nothing if you were filtering for a section that you then deleted it. In that case, the menu showed “all sections” but nothing was displayed (was still filtering for the bad section).

  • Fixed bug that could prevent the <%sections%> widget from displaying sections if the “suppress content on parent sections” option is selected in that section’s properties page.

  • Fixed bug that prevented images from being resized by servers running old versions of the GD Perl module.

  • Sites with HTML doctype get the closing “/” removed from self-closing tags in rich-text fields. Previous versions always used the XHTML format for <br />, <img /> and <hr />, for example.

  • Updated to prototype.js 1.5.1.1 which fixes potential crashing bugs in the Safari browser.

  • Fixed bug that could cause crashing error in password-helper if you call the script with a badly formed URL.

  • Fixed a bug that caused noisy “uninitialized value” warnings in web error log.

Upgrading from 2.0b45 or later?

If you’re upgrading from v2.0b45 or later, you can update to the new version by following the instructions below. (For earlier versions, follow the full installation instructions in the download package; along the way, those instructions include special notes for upgrading.)

To upgrade from v2.0b45 or later:

1. Set your FTP client to “plain text” or “ascii” mode. Upload to moxiebin/Modules directory:

  • BigMed.pm
  • BigMed (directory and all contents)
  • JSON.pm
  • JSON (directory and all contents)

2. Upload to moxiedata/templates directory:

  • cp_templates (directory and all contents)
  • site_templates (directory and all contents)

3. Change your FTP client to “automatic” or “binary” mode. Upload to moxiedata/support:

  • assets (directory and all contents)

4. Upload to bmadmin directory:

  • css (directory and all contents)
  • js (directory and all contents)
  • themes (directory and all contents)
  • wysiwyg (directory and all contents)

5. 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

6. Clear browser cache

After installing the update, instruct all Big Medium editors to clear their browser cache.

This completes the update from 2.0b45 or later.

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"Dude, you're superman. By far the best product and best company I've ever dealt with hands down."
—Dave Cedrone

"Your system is so easy to run and modify. We're going to go live a week early, which never happens in this business."
—Mike McGann

"Man do I love this script. My entire site is now all Big Medium top-to-bottom. I have used many, many scripts in my time... This one has me hooked and is the best I have ever used for a news site. Josh, you're the man."
—Don McPartland

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