Fine tuning in Basel

Tomorrow I'm doing a demo for a company located in Basel, Switzerland. This demo has been scheduled since the beginning of August, so you know the audience is expecting a killer demo. So apart from my trustworthy slide-deck that uncovers Sitecore and the API, I felt I had to finetune my stuff a bit.

A blog post from a colleague gave me a good idea of what to improve on my Nicam demo-site. Thanks to Alex Shyba for pointing out that little detail about enabling the Rich-Text Editor to filter MS Word  content by your own definition during copy/paste. This is not a new thing in Sitecore version 6, but the way it works OOTB have changed a bit. Nevertheless you can in a very simple manner tune the editor to do what you expect, whenever you are copying content from MS Word.

Another thing I want to present is the SEO module. This one was ported to version 6 a long time ago, but still I hadnt implemented it on the Nicam site. Shame on me. Quick trip to SDN to download the module, and about 3 minutes of installing. Easy.

One last thing I corrected while i was at it, was to display the bold, italic and underline buttons in the Rich-Text Editor. It seems we went a few steps to far when doing the version 6 release (internally known as "the simplicity" release). I personally know that I can just use the wellknown keyboard shortcuts in the editor, but not all editors know this. And frankly how bad can it be to display a few extra buttons?!?

The steps taken to "re-insert" these 3 buttons in the editor are very simple. Open up the core database, navigate to System -> Settings -> HTML Editor Profiles -> Rich Text Default -> Toolbar 1. Right-click and insert an HTML Editor button item. To insert a "BOLD" button simply name your new item 'Bold' and also write ' bold' in the 'click' field (yes, it is that simple. The editor backend code is already done, Sitecore is just not exposing the actual button until you force it to).

 

 

So now my Nicam site, running on version 6, is exposing a bit more functionality and easy of use. Perfection can always be improved...