Friday, June 10, 2011
Recently we released two product updates. The first made the navigation among the various "families" of skins consistent, making it less traumatic to switch between skins on your site. The other is the second phase of tag support!
Before this release, different types of skins (Acton, Yorktown, Classic, Objective, Newton) handled the navigation differently. As EditMe has matured, its handling of navigation has become more sophisticated and easier to manage. But our old skins weren't always updated to reflect these changes. As a result, some very old skins, like Classic, didn't support any automatic navigation at all. Some later skins, like Yorktown, started to use EditMe's Organize feature to list pages under a special NavBar1 or NavBar2 page with pages under the Menu page listed on the side. Then Objective simplified things by using Menu as the root of all pages, with the top level pages under Menu making up the top navigation bar and subsequent pages in the current "section" appearing in a side navigation.
As a result of this consistency, switching between skins in EditMe could mean your site's navigation disappearing! This problem is now fixed. All of EditMe's skins not only have automatic navigation based on the Organize feature, but all of them now use the Menu page as the root of your site's navigation tree. This means you can now try out different skins in EditMe without fear of your navigation not showing up or having to reorganize pages into a different structure.
What this also means is that if you change skins from one of the older skins before this change was made, you may need to move your pages from NavBar1 to Menu. You can do this via the Organize tab on your site's editing screen.
We also rolled out phase two of tag support in EditMe. You've been able to add tags to a page on the Properties tab of the editing screen for some time now, but there wasn't any way to actually use these tags. Now you can display tags on your site and use them as part of your site's navigation. Also, tag support is now integrated into EditMe's API.
Tag Cloud
You can include a tag cloud in any page of your site by entering [[include:_TagCloud]]. You might choose to put this on your site's home page, or in the Menu page so its displayed on every page. Be sure to add some tags to a few pages first.
Page Tags
Display a list of tags on the current page with [[include:_ListTags]]. Each tag on the page will be listed and linked to a list of other pages with that tag. That list is another script named _TaggedPages, which can be linked to directly as needed.
What's Next
Future plans for tag support include integration with the Site Explorer and integration with the Objective skin.
