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KoKo

KoKo FAQ

If you have a question about Koko, you should use this area as your first point of reference. If these answers do not cover your problem, contact Koko-support on 01273 566093 or email koko-support@keymedia.co.uk

New Features!

Administering Your Website

Folders

Documents

Contributed Questions

Can I use the WYSIWYG editor on a Mac?

As of 16/07/2003 you can edit your site in WYSIWYG mode on Mac OSX, Linux and Windows if you install the latest Netscape or Mozilla browser.

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I hate that all my URLs have 'cms.cgi' in them. Can I have shorter URLS?

As of 25/06/2003 yes, you can! Contact gianfranco@keymedia.co.uk for details.

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Can I set dates for a document or folder to be published?

As of KoKo 2.06, (27/05/2003) yes, you can! Use the start and end select boxes on the left hand side of the document and folder inspectors to set the dates between which you wish your document or folder to appear published.

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Can users sign up to use part of my site?

As of KoKo 2.06, (27/05/2003) yes, you can! If you require this feature to be enabled on your installation, please contact koko-support@keymedia.co.uk.

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What am I looking at in the admin screens?

Site admin is hierarchical, the admin screen you will see being one of

  1. Folder Inspector
  2. Document Inspector
  3. Component Inspector

Each inspector is responsible for changes at the appropriate level.

While viewing any Folder Inspector or Document Inspector, you can ABANDON any changes you have made and return to a parent folder by clicking on the appropriate part of the white text in the cookie-trail nav in the green bar at the top of the page.

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What is the Folder Inspector?

The first page you are taken to is the folder inspector. Depending on the permissions set on your site by the superuser, you may not have permission to

You can always however modify properties of any documents in the folder.

The folder inspector is split into two ares, entitled 'Documents in this folder' and 'This Folder's Properties'

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What are 'Documents In This Folder'?

This is a list of

Clicking on a document takes you to the document inspector for that document.

Clicking on a folder takes you to the folder inspector for that folder.

You may also 'select' documents and subfolders in the current folder using the select boxes in the appropraite rows.

Below the list of documents and subfolders is a select menu with options:

Selecting one of these options and clicking the adjacent 'GO' button performs the selected task.

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What's so special about 'index.htm'?

'index.htm' in any folder on your site is the first document that will be displayed for any given folder. That is, if your URL looks like 'http://mysite.com/cms.cgi/site/foo/bar/' then the page that will be displayed is actually 'http://mysite.com/cms.cgi/site/foo/bar/index.htm'. For this reason it is important to always have ONE file called index.htm in any given folder.

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What are 'This Folder's Properties'?

This section of the Folder Inspector allows you to choose

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What is the Document Inspector?

On this page you can change

  1. the keywords used in the document header
  2. the description used in the document header
  3. The published status of the document
  4. The categorisation of the docuemnt (which has no effect, except in the news section)
  5. The order attibute of this document, which controls the position this document will appear in any list of this document and its peers
  6. The components that appear in the document

For more information on metatags, try a Google search, or visit www.webdeveloper.com

Regarding 6), you can choose to

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What is the Component Inspector?

If we have chosen to edit a component (WYSIWYG mode available only for Windows + IE users) you will be taken to the component inspector for the component in question. This screen is comprised of a toolbar area and an editing area. The tools along the top are

[FROM LEFT TO RIGHT]

[NEXT ROW OF TOOLS]

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How can I hide a folder/document?

Use the 'published' attribute for the appropriate folder/document

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I can only edit the source code - what's wrong?

The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is currently only available to IE users running Windows. Check that you are not using Netscape by mistake. Components which have been set to type 'scripted' in the document inpsector cannot be edited in WYSIWYG mode. This is intentional, to protect any in-the-page scripting they may contain.

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How do I link to a download?

Use the image browser in the component editor. At the top of the image browser are three links, 'IMAGES', 'EMBEDS' and 'DOWNLOADS'.

Click on 'DOWNLOADS' and use the file upload box to browse your computer for the file that will be the download. Click on 'upload' and wait for the page to refresh. The file you have uploded will now be available in the select menu of the refreshed page.

In the main component editing window, highlight the text you wish to become a link to the download. Then in the popup window, select the download item from the select menu, and click 'USE ITEM'.

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How do use a document in more than one place?

Create the document in one of the locations. Then use the folder-inspector to copy the document to your clipboard. Next, navigate using the folder-inspector to the part of the site where the second copy of the document is to appear, and paste shortcuts to documents in clipboard .

Note that any document can also include any previosly created component, thus giving you an alternative way to re-use a document's content.

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How do I order a list of folders/document?

Use the 'order' attribute for the appropriate folder/document.

Currently, on some sites running the CMS, it is not possible to change the alphabetical order of the folders. This problem is being looked into.

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When I copy and paste from Word, the text looks funny. What am I doing wrong?

Copying and pasting from word doesn't work well, because Word inserts dirty HTML. Either you can edit the source code to clean this up, OR you can first copy and paste from Word to Notepad, and then copy and paste from Notepad to the component. You will lose all your formatting in the process, but will also lose all the dirty HTML.

Note, font tags are removed by the server, but that is the only HTML cleansing that is performed.

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When I try to upload a file, I get the message 'bad filename'. What does this mean?

This means that you are trying to upload a file with a filename that contains characters other than 'A-Z, a-z 0-9, _,-,.'. Try renaming the file in question before uploading it.

Future releases may rename the file for you on upload.

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I'm getting the message 'Software error:can't get stats on xmlfile: No such file or directory'. What does this mean?

This means that you are requesting a file that does not exist. If you have reason to believe the file should really exist, please contact the author.

Future releases may give a more helpful error message.

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Old work seems to appear at times when going back and forth through the live site

Check your internet settings on your browser - it may be that you are seeing a 'cached' copy of your site. Cache-ing can occur at several levels:

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when I create a table in the document I'm working in, the text that I type into it is in a much bigger font size

When a table is created, it has blank spaces in the cells, with no paragraph formatting. Often you will want to apply a paragraph format to the text by selecting the text in question and selecting style 'Normal' from the style select menu.

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When viewing the site, some pages have random 'script'

If you have copied and pasted from a Word document, you may get remnants of code that you don't want, but which you can't see in the WYSIWYG editor, like <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> for example.

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How do I add to the navigation?

By adding pages and folders to the site. If you want to know why that should change your navigation, read on.

The navigation on your website is defined by

  1. The folder-structure of your site
  2. The design of your site

Navigation comes in several flavours, but they tend to deal with a family-tree notion of the site. For example, you may have a news section, which contains a homepage and two subsections, international and national, each of which contain pages of the appropriate news. In this example a national news page has siblings which are the other national news items. A national news page also has a parent folder which is the national news folder. It has a grandparent folder which is the news folder, and so on and so forth. Consider now the navigation on dir.yahoo.com . Click on 'Education' and then 'Higher_Education'. Near the top of the page you will see something like this: Home > Education > Higher Education Clicking on 'Home' and 'Education' takes you to the relevant section. Each section lists links to subsections, and any items that belong to the current section. This style of navigation is called 'cookie-trail' navigation. Another common style displays a left-hand menu of sections, which opens when you click on a section to display the subsections and any items in that section. Again though, the aim of the navigation is to provide links to

Many sites have the top-level navigation hard-coded into the page templates if the design required that these be displayed in a particular way. Deeper level folders and documents ought to have their links appear in a more generic and automatic fashion.

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Some elemens of the navigation don't seem to get updated when I make a change to the site.

Because of the depth of some sites' navigation, it is not feasible to update all the pages' navigation when one page on the site changes. To mitigate for this, the cache is emptied daily at 1:30am (GMT).

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I've changed the order attributes on my documents, but they haven't changed order on the admin screen. What's wrong?

The order will only become apparent on the public view of the site. Although you perhaps used to be able to see the re-order on the admin screen, this was changed as it caused problems when trying to delete documents. See changelog.xml#21_Aug_2002

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Does this item apply to me?

Yes. All implementations of the CMS system are the same. Usernames, passwords, templates, page structure and some metadata differ, but otherwise all the sites are the same.

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What is the difference between the 'save changes' buttons on the document inspector? When should they be used?

All the save changes buttons perform the same action. They should be used to save any changes to the document such as name or id or meta-data modifications. Also, it's a good idea to use it even if you have only just finished modifying existing content as the document is LOCKED by you while you are editing it.

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Can I use KoKo in Opera?

You can use Opera to edit your site, though you should use the non-WYSIWYG edit mode. Unfortunately, bacause of the microsoft technology used for that particular editing feature, it is unlikely that the WYSIWYG functionality will be extended to other browsers any time soon.

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Is there an easy way to do links to another part of a page using Koko or if I have to learn the html?

There is, but it's a little circuitous:

Step 1: Identify the part of the page you want to link to

Step 2: Go to that part of the document, hightlight some text (say the title, or the first word of the paragraph in question) and insert a link to #top (the default link it creates).

Step 3: Place the cursor in the middle of the newly created link, and click on the Property Inspector.

Step 4: In the Property Inspector, set the href attribute to nothing (I mean, remove everything from the href attribute text field) and write a word (no spaces, all lower case) in the name attribute field, say myanchorname

Step 5: To create a link to the newly created anchor, create a link to #myanchorname

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Author:Gianfranco Marletta, tel:+44 [0]1273 565797