New Bloggers

I’m adding a couple new bloggers to my recommended reading section which just shows as “recommended” because of the word wrap.

Alan Evan’s blog - www.cleverthink.com.  Alan, as the blog title goes, is a pretty clever guy who writes about technology, business and many of the new trends coming our way.  He’s a pretty active blogger, posting just about every other day.  It’s kinda funny because he sits about 30 feet from me at work and I never knew…now I do and I dig his blog so give it a read.

John Sim - www.bluestudios.co.uk/blog.  John’s blog apparently has been around for some time, but it appears he’s now starting working with Oracle’s Universal Content Server.  He has quite a bit of content on a variety of subjects, but is also posting some UCM examples.

New Component Version

All of my UCM examples and components are developed right here(as if you could see me) on my local laptop.  I’m running W2K03 server R2, Oracle enterprise 11g and Oracle UCM 10gr3 1.3.3.3(something like that…just patched so it ends with 3 now).  If your environment is different most of these examples will still work, but ocassionally there are issues.  For instance,  I had a request for a Stellent 7.5.1 and JVM 1.4.2 version of the IDOC Developer interface.  I don’t have a great 751 test environment, but I managed to dig one up at work.  It needed a couple tweaks, but over all pretty much the same.  Here’s the link though if you need that earlier version(rememebr you will need scriptaculous).

idocdeveloper_stellent751_java_142

Really, Really old Refinery Example

Way back in the day I had a lot of fun playing with Stellent’s inbound refinery.  In fact the first project ever posted to content on content management was a .NET example and framework to create a custom conversion engine for the 7.5.1 refinery.  Basically it was two projects; The framework which is just an assembly that provides an abstract class you inherit to create the conversion engine and an example conversion engine using the framework.  I wrote the post, threw it up on the site(then in DotNetNuke..yuck) and proceeded to ignore the blog for the better part of a year(I am pretty sure no one ever visited the site either).  By the time I actually started blogging 10gr3 was out with it’s whole new refinery and I never re-posted the project.  Then a few weeks ago on the Oracle forums I mentioned the example and there was a bit of intrest in the project.  I’ve actually had it posted for download for a little while now, but figured I would call some attention to it with this post.

Here’s the link:

.NET Custom Refinery Converter

Posting aside, I’ve still have been working on some site improvements over the past few weeks.  COCM runs on WordPress and there’s no shortage of plugins and enhancements out there.  The blog currently has quite a few plugins installed, but only a few enabled.  I often download a couple, install them and see if they add to the site.  If they do I leave them on, but more often I usually just disable them.  I try and stay conservative with the user experience, with all those bells and whistles out there I’m really tempted to go crazy, but if they don’t add to the experience(which is really just reading) I don’t think they are worth it.

That said I’ve rolled out a couple new features which I think will add to your Content On Content Management experience.

Post Ratings  – Post ratings are a very cool little plugin from Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.  The plug-in adds a little 5 star interface to the bottom of each post and page and it lets the user community throw a little rating on the post. 

(No Ratings Yet) 

Five stars would indicate that you really liked what I wrote, one star probably means I need to work on things a little.  Obviously this feedback is mostly for me, though we will be able to create some side bar naviagation to display the most poplar posts.  The little stars are all AJAX enabled, so it’s just a click.  Give it a go.

Forums – I’ve been putting out some sample components and code examples and from time to time I recieve emails with questions or issues.  Though none of my little example projects are truely “supported”, I really would like to try and help answer any questions I can. 

In the upper nave you’ll now find a link to our forums where everyone can ask questions and hopefully recieve prompt, concise answers.  There are two forums, one for support questions specific to code examples I’ve posted on the site.  If its just a general “how would you go about doing X” type question, there is also a “General Dicussion” area.

Better Spam Control – It wasn’t too bad at first, but for the last few weeks my blog comments have been spammed pretty hard.  And not just the 70% of viagra spam…some really, really raunchy stuff. 

I’ve installed a plugin called Akismet for the comments and the new forums sport CAPTCHAs for each post.  I’m particulary impressed with Akisment as it basically reads the comments, then somehow magically decides if it’s spam.  So far so good, nothing has gotten through.

Ideas or Advice – If you have any ideas for the site or ideas for future components or examples, I’d love to hear them.  Send me an email or better yet, post somthing in the forums.