This April, we will be attending the Albany Autism Society’s 11th Annual Gala “Unlocking the Possibilities”  to show our support for those affected by the Autism Spectrum.

Today, 1 in 110 children are being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder; for boys, the number is 1 in 70. With our sponsorship, we hope to help bring these services to even more children and adults affected by autism, and to support the professionals who help them.

Our family is directly affected by this, as our two boys have both been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. For families like ours, organizations like the Autism Society are a godsend. By providing awareness, support and education, this group helps achieve the early detection and intensive early treatment that is vital to creating positive outcomes for those with autism. Their community center encourages empowerment, skill building, community awareness, hope and wellness through these programs.

There’s a TwinTechs home page template, and a home created with text/image components, using that template.

One of the trickier parts was getting the template and components to obey the CSS from the original site. I ran into an issue where the CSS paths to images, such as “/directoryA/directoryB/directoryC/images/imageName.jpg” would get truncated to simply “images/imageName.jpg”. This obviously broke the display of page components that needed image links via CSS. CQ also has a quirky method of making CSS styles available for customized text components.

Tutorials linked in earlier posts mentioned using clientlib folders to link CSS to applications. I largely abandoned that approach, and instead used hard <link>s and the writeCssIncludes() function to inject the CSS directly into the head elements of the page. More on that, here.

I learned a lot about the paragraph system that CQ uses to enable components to be embedded into a page, and how mistakes in using that system were the root causes for many of the rabbit trails that I took in developing this page. For example, having two such paragraph nodes in a page, with the same name (path attribute), will cause the available components list to become blank. When your Sidekick becomes empty like that, you start following the “what do do when you components are missing from the sidekick” guides, which deal with malformed components, design permissions settings, etc, when you really just need to give each of those paragraph nodes a unique name. It is interesting that such a simple error does not generate a warning of any kind, but can have a big impact outside of the template/page, itself.

Opera’s built-in Dragonfly was essential for debugging issues. Dragonfly might be considered a more feature-rich version of Firebug, enabling you to inspect DOM elements, CSS, etc. Opera is not a supported browser for CQ, so I used Firebug to view the published version of the CQ TwinTechs page, and Dragonfly to view the structure of the original Twin page, for comparisons.

- Twin Techs CQ Team

http://yourhostipaddress:4502/cf#/content/applicationname/path/pagename.html

If you use a browser add-on like Firebug to inspect the CSS, you will be inspecting the WCM, itself. In order to inspect your page, directly, you have to remove the /cf# from the URL.  With that, you can view just your page and the Sidekick. If you want to go a step further, and see your page as it would appear on the publish server, removing the sidekick, append this to the URL:

?wcmmode=disabled

- Twin Techs CQ Team

Please follow this link while enjoying a warm afternoon coffee from the company pot on me.

There is a CQ IRC channel: ##day-cq on irc.freenode.net

It’s not a densely populated room, and the window for meaningful conversation closes by about 5pm EST.  Note that the double-hash on the room name is not a typo.

The Adobe forums are accessible if you register a free account. They are hit and miss, but actual Adobe folks might give you an answer.

I’m told that if you have a DayCare account, you can post tickets to get direct responses.

- The Twin Techs CQ Team

http://localhost:4502/etc/importers/site/extractor.html#/etc/designs/sampleapp/dev/sampleapp-original.html

You can force the WCM into design mode, for example, by adding this to the end of a URL: ?wcmmode=design

You might need to do that if the Sidekick loses its mode control icons, which is an occasional bug that you might encounter.

If you’re in the WCM, and you have malformed components on a page, and the Sidekick will not allow you to select them (so you can then remove them), you can edit your page back in CRXDE, under the /content/app/page path, and remove the offending content there. Save, then head back to WCM for a refresh. You still have to fix your components, but you can now edit the page in the WCM, as desired.

- The Twin Techs CQ Team

•  If you want to delete a node, and then replace it with a node of the same name, you must save in between operations, or the new operation will fail (the error message will not tell you how to resolve the issue). Sometimes the “revert” operation will not even get you unstuck from this situation, and you must close and reopen the editor, to hopefully find your site in the last saved state.

• Pages created in the WCM appear under /content/appName/pages in the hierarchy. If you change, add, or delete pages in the WCM, they will not be updated in the JCR tree, even if you save and refresh, or collapse the hierarchy and reopen it. You must close CRXDE Lite and reopen it. The same is not true in the other direction – changes made in the editor will be reflected in the WCM when you refresh.

After I added this, I had a proper, usable par node in the template that I was creating. While authoring in design mode, I could use the edit option and toggle on my custom “TwinImport” group of components.  The group was a collection of components adapted from the Geometrixx demo, made from scratch, and imported from the Site Importer tool. I was very curious to see the actual components in action, now that they could be dropped into a page and tested. Some looked decent, and some were disasters, but at that point in the project, they all lacked the CSS to govern them.

- the Twin Techs CQ Team

- the Twin Techs CQ Team