You may be familiar with IntenseDebate, Disqus, and their ilk. These tools produce wretched markup that pollutes my pages significantly and is difficult to style correctly.
I have a site which is statically generated. Are there hosted commenting options that are simple, clean, unobstrusive, and easy to style?
The solution I settled on was using hosted-commenting JSON APIs plus JS templating. You give up the social-media button widgets and you have to roll some of your own comment form, but that's ultimately a small price to pay in my book.
Related
I am trying to help out an organization that hired some developers to create their website back in 2016, and the developers haven't touched the site since 2016.
I don't know enough about Sage to know if the developers really screwed things up, or if what they have done is the way things need to be done in Sage. One example of something that has me scratching my head (in between banging it on my keyboard): some page content - content that needs to be updated on at least a yearly basis - is hard-coded into template files, so that in order to update the information, you have to go in past the warnings about using the Theme Editor, figure out which included template contains the content, and update it there.
NOT something your typical office employee is likely to be able to do, yes?
My question is: is it even worth trying to keep this site running under Sage, or should I rebuild the site using a more user-friendly template? The site currently has fewer than 2 dozen pages plus a dozen or so posts and I would say is unlikely to get a whole lot larger, given the available resources.
Thanks for any advice you can offer.
The problem to me doesn't seem to be so much about the Roots Sage theme framework, but that the developers didn't follow the most basic rules regarding WordPress theme development--separating the content from presentation. Hardcoding content into a template is just bad practice, and this would make any site difficult to edit no matter what framework it was built on.
If it's as simple as printing the content into a template so that page editor content changes can be reflected on the frontend, it may be a simple as adding the_content() to the corresponding page template overrides and removing the hardcoded content.
FWIW: Sage 8 templates are not that different from your standard WP templates, it's not using a templating engine like Blade, so you should be able to customize the templates if you're already familiar with standard WP templates.
So probably no need to burn it all down.
I would like to ask if anybody knows an easy way to test Telerik controls with Watin.
We are about to start using it but before we do I wanted to see if there is anything I would need to know.
The problem that I can see we will be having is that if even smallest thing changes then all our tests will also break.
Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.
The problem that I can see we will be having is that if even smallest thing changes then all our tests will also break.
This could/will be true of all portions of your pages, including Telerik controls, depending on your test structure. Ideally, your elements will have IDs assigned and you'll use Page classes and custom control objects to remove all HTML references from your actual test code. Then if something changes on the webpage (or in a control), you verify the change is expected, then you change the WatiN page code (or control code) and re-run your tests.
The WatiN page class primer is here: http://watinandmore.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-page-class.html
Basically, you want to have your test code look like myPage.PickDate("3/29/2012") and not like ie.Tables[3].TableRows[2].TableCells[4].Textbox(Find.ByClass("datePicker")).TypeText("3/29/2012")
Changes can, do and should result in failing tests, however, I can attest that with a good page (or control) class setup that abstract away the HTML DOM and other specifics leaving non-HTML-filled test code, means that when changes do happen they are most often easy to get working again.
Note: Selenium also has a Page class concept, but I have not used it very much as of right now. Bottom line: If you write a lot of tests that reference the HTML DOM directly in test code, you're setting yourself up for a maintenance headache regardless of if you go with WatiN or Selenium or whatever.
Added: As to your original question: Can you work with Telerik controls in WatiN? Yes you can most likely, but depending on the control you may need to get a bit creative, possibly even calling javascript methods from within your test (page object ;) ). I've been stumped by a couple controls (non-Telerik) but most I've eventually figured out.
I realize you asked about WatiN, and I know I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion, but I might recommend Selenium instead. It seems to be more widely used and when we were evaluating the two we found Selenium easier to work with because of the Firefox plugin to record/generate the tests. This meant that our non-technical folks could set up the tests.
Since then we've successfully used Selenium to test ASP.NET sites that utilize Telerik controls. I only ran into one issue, with the RadNumericTextBoxes, which I've documented a fix for here: http://www.msigman.com/2012/02/entering-radnumerictextbox-selenium-webdriver-1-6-0/.
I'm currently in the process of writing a how-to guide for doing it: http://www.msigman.com/2012/03/automated-testing-asp-net-web-application/ (shameless plug).
You should also consider evaluating Telerik's Test Studio, our functional automation test tool. (Disclosure: I'm their evangelist for Test Studio.)
Test Studio really shines when you're working with Telerik controls. You'll get some great additional functionality around being able to dive deeper in to verifications and actions around the controls.
Even more importantly, Test Studio handles centralizing locators and pages by default, so you don't need any additional effort to best manage your UI changes.
I've been searching google for a while to determine the most coder-friendly example boxes.
I'm wanting to share varying forms of ECMA script (JS for example) etc that provides the user with color coding and a simple way of copying the code. I know there are several out there, but I wanted to get some opinions from SOF since you guys probably have good experience with code.
so- What's the code-sharing tool you [would] use?
the solution
I ended up using Gist for complete snippets and am using Syntax Highlighter for *incomplete * code samples. There's a Drupal plugin for the Syntax Highlighter, but I dare say it's more of a pain to figure out the plugin than it is to just do things the old fashioned way (old fashioned being like 5 years ago..)
I use http://jsfiddle.net/
Color coding — check
HTML, CSS, JS — check
Live demo — check
gist has syntax highlighting and users can download the files separately, as a zip archive or using git. You can embed the files easily on other sites.
Additionally, the site tracks changes and other users can add comments or fork a gist to change it themselves.
basically, my question is pretty much similar and has been asked numerous times. Which WYSIWYG editor is better now that Telerik has released their MVC editor, would it be wise to purchase the entire suite instead?
Selections:
TinyMCE
CKEditor
Telerik MVC Editor
Disclaimer: As part of the Telerik MVC team (and one of the editor developers), my opinion is quite biased, yet I can shed some light on the differences between the editors.
All of them are open source
Despite Todd's answer, the Telerik MVC editor is open-source, under GPLv2 license (with a commercial license available). Our support is well known, so I guess this is where we stand out (though it is paid). On the other hand, both TinyMCE and CKEditor have huge communities, which may help quickly, too.
Different feature set
This has been the first release of the Telerik MVC editor, while CK and TinyMCE have been around the block for a very long time. We have mixed feelings about this -- while we are missing out on quite a few tools/features, we have invested a lot of time in polishing the existing ones (converting list items to headings, pasting from MS Word). Our bet is on cleaner, more robust code (4k LoC vs 14k LoC in TinyMCE without plug-ins).
It depends on your requirements
After all, with the Telerik suite, you get... well... a suite of components with common code and themes. So if you need the dedicated support and the other components and the limited feature set does not make a difference, Telerik would be a nice choice. If you need a full-scale editor and want to bet on more feature-complete products, TinyMCE and CKEditor are the wiser choice.
I hope this helps and does not contain much happy talk.
Some Background:
While there are some very good third-party components for ASP.NET I tend to stay away from them for the open source alternative. The reason goes back to an issue I has with a chart component a few years ago. It had a bug that the company would not fix in the current version and instead wanted us to purchase an upgrade while not guaranteeing that would fix the problem.
They did offer a demo that we could not use in production (which was the only place we were getting the problem) so the problem continued until the component was replaced.
My Answer
From My experience I would recommend going with the open source alternative. I have used CKEditor and TinyMCE with success in PHP projects. CKEditor can be styled nicely and TinyMCE has tons of documentation from the millions of people who use it daily.
The greatest benefit to open source is being able to change the code to meet your needs or fix a problem specific to your environment.
My last ASP.NET MVC app required all components to be open source for the same reason as mentioned above with the end result being more stable than the previous that included some purchased components.
Hope this helps.
Wordpress uses TinyMCE, so I am very familiar with using it (though getting it to look like wordpress is a little bit of an undertaking).
I have successfully implemented TinyMCE into 2 of my Asp.Net MVC websites with very little effort.
As with any, there is a ramp up time, but TinyMCE has never disappointed me.
We are using CKEditor_3.x in our MVC 2 app.
It works great.
On save:
Just 1 important note, in your CKEditor config file be sure to set:
config.htmlEncodeOutput = true;
Or you will get an error message.
Later on display
You will need to decode is like:
<%=HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(Html.TextAreaFor(model => model.Description).ToHtmlString())%>
Good luck!
Is there a utility that will generate html or css for blocks of code (.net c#) when you post it on a website?
I have seen several websites with very nicely formatted code and I dont believe they do this manually.
Google prettify -
http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/
I prefer Syntax Highlighter implementations (I'm using Wordpress plugin implementation for my blog).
Advantages
It is based on JavaScript and does
not care about what you have on the
server.
Posts with this formatting display
properly on different RSS feeds and
can be copied to clipboard.
It is trivial to extend syntax
rules. I'm using that to highlight
custom operators in Boo-based DSL (see sample post)
Multiple languages are supported
out-of-the-box
(source: googlecode.com)
You can get JavaScript syntax-highlighting scripts, such as this one by Dean Edwards.
This is also a jQuery version apparently based on it which looks good.
CopySourceAsHtml is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 that allows you to copy source code, syntax highlighting, and line numbers as HTML.
http://copysourceashtml.codeplex.com
It's highly configurable, and works much better than the download page would make you expect! Don't know if there is something similar for VS 2008
If you don't have the ability to add the google prettifier CSS reference, this would be a better way to go, as what you get is a complete HTML with the required style. I use it all the time on our developers wiki, and loving it.
An even better solution, if you don't want to bother installing anything, is to just use the little web app I wrote called BlogTrog CodeWindow:
http://www.blogtrog.com
It's easy to use. Just paste your code and embed the results.