This is the code that needed to be embedded into the body of the page which will trigger a flash player and stream a flash movie in to the browser:

<object class="cantaloupe_video" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0"
width="480" height="294" id="backlight_player" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
<param name="movie" value="http://player.backlight.tv/player/?video_code=VDF2upIPH8s6239EQ90L" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" />
<param name="flashvars" value="" />
<embed src="http://player.backlight.tv/player/?video_code=VDF2upIPH8s6239EQ90L" flashvars="" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" width="480" height="294" name="backlight_player" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>

Well, after I open a new content block and paste this code in the richtextarea/html input field and publish it, no video is displayed on the front page. After various debugging sessions I discovered that Ektron automatically strips out the <embed> tag. This is done probably because Ektron is trying to produce valid XHTML/HTML code and the embed tag is not.

How do we overcome the issue? We really have two options:

1. Force Ektron’s new WYSIWYG editor to accept the invalid code and display it with the embed tag (not recommended, will not be covered here).
2. Find a better way to embed the video with valid code.

While option one is not recommended and I’ll not cover it here, option two is quite easy and clean. To produce clean code use the following few lines of HTML instead, you can edit the original video code manually in an editor and then insert it into the content block:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:454px; height:278px;"
data="http://player.backlight.tv/player/?video_code=VDF2upIPH8s6239EQ90L">
<param name="movie" value="http://player.backlight.tv/player/?video_code=VDF2upIPH8s6239EQ90L" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
</object>

What you need to focus on in the object tag which includes the width and height in the style element and the data element which includes the URL to the movie itself. Only one parameter is really required here: ‘movie’ which has the same URL to the actual movie. Everything else is not required and may not be necessary.

So, after cleaning up the original code, I inserted this new one into the content block, published it and vuala! it worked.

Thanks to Jeff Martinez for pointing it out on the Ektron Fourms.

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Until now, what I end up doing is removing all the ‘.svn’ subfolders, checking out the project to another folder, removing all the files from the checked out folder (SVN Delete), copying over all the current set of files/folders, and checking the whole thing back in to the SVN repository. This works well but it requires some serious file manipulation efforts. Here are two usefull tools I just recently discovered that can help tremendously with this process:

1. Cleaning an entire subversion working folder from ‘.svn’ folders:

Ryan Christensen describes how to remove all .svn subfolders from a SVN working copy. In short, you need to create a small ‘.cmd’ file that will live in the top folder that you want to detach from SVN and write this command in it:

for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%i in ('dir /s /b /a:d *svn') do ( rd /s /q "%%i" )

I saved it as cleansvn.cmd and run it from a command line window after changing the current directory to the project folder. You will need to wait until the TortoiseSVN checks all the subfolders because it keeps a bunch of info in cache and with this util – it doesn’t refresh veru quickly. But it works great.

2. The new Rsync for Windows, called RichCopy:

Apparently, Microsoft has recently (April 2009) published this free utility called RichCopy which comes to replace the RoboCopy GUI tool from 2006. According to the article, this utility is also many times more efficient and handles multi threading, network connections, etc. I tried it and it worked great for me.

Here are the new steps for my ‘SVN Reintegrate’ procedure:

1. Backup all working copies before proceeding
2. Clean working copy from all ‘.svn’ folders
3. Checkout latest project from SVN repository to another folder (not a subfolder)
4. Use RichCopy to copy over all the files, these are the settings:
   1. Source: the new clean working folder
   2. Destination: the latest SVN checked out folder
   3. Use the ‘Purge’ option
   4. Exclude all ‘.svn’ folders from this process
5. SVN Commit the SVN folder that was overwritten by the working folder

A bit confusing but if you know what you are doing it can save you a few white hairs. Enjoy!

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This year, 2009, we will see how open source projects will make huge strides and erase the gap with commercial projects, if not gain an advantage over them. Here is why:

1. Unbeatable Price: free! I know, it is not entirely true, you still need services around open source products and arguably more than in commercial products. But as the market learns to adopt more and more open source products the TCO can be lower with open source than commercial products, especially if you have the right team on your side.

2. Gain from the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, instead of wisdom of one as is often the case with commercial products. We see examples of this all over, in particular in the web development industry: Umbraco is gaining huge marketing share compared with Ektron. Magento Commerce is gaining huge market share over any other open source ecommerce platform and some of the low and mid-level commercial products in the ecommerce industry. Similar thing is happening with ASP.NET: the framework is now adopting the MVC design pattern mostly due to the fact that other platforms like Zend Framework and Ruby are free and product amazing websites. Top it off by the adoption of jQuery in almost any commercial web product today including ASP.NET framework which dumped AJAX.NET in favour of jQuery.

3. This is the sad-but-true part: developers are being laid off and hence join open source projects. It is known that the IT industry lags about 6 months after the indicators have come in, in other words, hi-tech layoffs will continue to come. In any case, more developers will be out of a job and will have plenty of time to collaborate and volunteer in open source projects – a great way to polish a resume…

To summarize, in 2009 we will see a great boost in open source adoption. Now, I am not saying that commercial products will not see any upside this year, but the competition will certainly be tougher then ever before. I am excited to see how it plays out. We certainly are going to focus our energies and our client’s energies on the leaders of each industry. You?

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Recently, jQuery – the agile JavaScript Library – has reached a tipping point. Here is a list of CMS and eCommerce systems that our clients are most interested in and their status with regard to jQuery.

Systems where jQuery is officially supported:

1. Microsoft has adopted jQuery and will offer intellisense support in its dominant IDE: Visual Studio 2008.

2. Umbraco - an open source CMS now offers jQuery by default and using jQueryin Umbraco is a matter of adding a simple call in order to include the jQuery files in the page.

3. Drupal - is an open source CMS and Framework CMS, as of version 5 it offers jQuery streight from its core. There are plans to build a centralized jQuery plugin in Drupal version 7.

4. Typo3 - is an open source CMS Framework. Typo3 has a jQuery extension that allows advanced integration with jQuery.

5. DotNetNuke - an open source ASP.NET CMS. Since October 2008 DotNetNuke offers built in jQuery support beginning with version 5.

Systems where jQuery is not supported:

1. Joomla - seems to favor Mootools over jQuery. Here is an article on how to support jQuery within Joomla and avoid conflicts with other libraries.

2. Zend Framework – the leading PHP Framework following the MVC design pattern. A press release was issued in May 2008 announcing Zend Framework and Dojo partnership.

3. Magento Commerce – an open source eCommerce platform that is gaining huge market share in the eCommerce industry. Currently Magento Commerce supports prototype JS library instead of jQuery, but offers ways to integrate jQuery easily.

4. Zen-Cart - an open source eCommerce (competing with Magento). At the moment Zen-Cart is not supporting any JavaScript library in its core.

Other systems and their relationship to jQuery:

1. WordPress - an open source blogging software. Uses jQuery for its core functionality and is avilable for any third party plugin.

2. Ektron CMS400 – Ektron has an enterprise level CMS with advanced content editing features. Oddly enough, Ektron seems to have embedded their own version of jQuery in their code.

While jQuery seems to be favored the favored JavaScript library by many developers, it has yet to be declared as the default one for many projects and systems. I’ll be keeping this list updated in the following months. Let me know if there is a system that interests you and I did not list it here.

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Second, my instance of Ektron CMS400 v.7.0.4.20 (which runs under .NET Framework 2.0) starting having problems. Specifically, I could no longer create library items in the workarea. Attempting to save a library item, for example, a hyperlink would cause the page to postback and the icon bar to disappear:

The postback page after attempting to save the library item

There is no error message, but viewing the library item list reveals that the item was not saved.

The culprit was the page /workarea/library.aspx. Viewing the HTML source of this page when attempting to “Add Library”, the form tag’s action attribute was:

library.aspx

… no querystring parameters; so when the page posts back in Ektron, it can’t save the library item and fails.

Viewing the same page on a system without .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 results in an action attribute like this:

 library.aspx?LangType=1033&action=AddLibraryItem&folder=98&type=images

Some background: As it turns out, the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installation changes the way the FORM tag’s ACTION attribute is handled. Prior to this upgrade, ASP.NET would ignore whatever you typed for the form’s action attribute in the markup. ASP.NET would instead render the action attribute to match the original page request. Starting with SP1, the action attribute is no longer ignored and will be rendered exactly as input.

Ektron, as it turns out, supplied an action attribute in the library.aspx form tag. Until the release of this Service Pack, it was ignored by ASP.NET.

Two possible solutions:

• Rollback install of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 – this is a somewhat complicated process.
• Remove the form tag’s action attribute in /workarea/library.aspx.

This may not be an issue in Ektron CMS400 7.5+, but users of v7.0 should be wary, even if they’re not planning on upgrading .NET Framework 3.5 SP1… Windows Update may upgrade you automatically around November of this year.

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Joomla vs Ektron

Thoughts?

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We recently spotted an article from Bill Roger’s blog (Ektron’s CEO) which discusses usage of the Ektron Server Controls v.s. Ektron’s API. At Activo, we are constantly using both approaches and indeed each approach is a bit different and is used in different situations. The article makes it much clearer that Ektron actually put more effort than we thought before into the Server Controls. Understanding that the Server Controls were made for this sort of usage makes us now feel more secure using this method. Previously, I always thought of this method as a hack and preferred the API.

Frank heads our .NET development team and added the following:

I’ve found it easier to start off with a foundation of one of the server controls and build off of that, rather than using only API calls. The server control acts as a “datareader” which can be used to access the data initially. Many of the custom controls we built to replace XSLT use this model:

• Add a ListSummary inside the user control/page and set its properties.
• Access the ListSummary’s EkItems property.
• Manipulate the data from EkItems, transform it, and output it into a repeater.

This tends to work more reliably than using the API calls. However, if the code needs to bypass the permissions model, the only option is to go direct using the API.

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1. Avoid XML/XSLT Tranformations for Controls Output

After researching the cause of a huge latency greater than 2 seconds on every page refresh, we have discovered that about 50% of the latency was during the Page_Load occurrence. A more thorough research revealed that the 50% in delay was occurring during the XSLT transformations of all the controls on the page.
By caching these controls, (this solution is only partial and not recommended), and changing the way controls are rendered onto the page, we were able to reduce this latency to less than half. Therefore, we recommend building your Ektron site with the basic Ektron controls, and if you need a special way to present the information, use the code behind to generate a display of the data while you gather the data through the Ektron API and process the data programmatically. In other words, avoid XSLT altogether.

2. Make Use of the Flex Menu Ektron Control

Most of the Ektron sites that we’ve had the chance to work on were structured similarly. The main menu was a set of multi-level menus, which are all rendered by a style-specific XSLT. In some cases, before running through the XSLT, a script was passing through the menu items to find the one that needed to be ’selected’.
Why should we reinvent the wheel?
If you read Ektron’s documentation, you will find a few menu controls that can be very handy: DHTMLMenu, Menu, SmartMenu, and FlexMenu. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. In short about each one:

• DHTMLMenu: My least favorite. Uses too much JavaScript and doesn’t render nicely for SEO
• Menu: The simplest one to use for basic menu systems
• SmartMenu: I like this menu because it’s a styled and nested unordered list. It can also support section 508 and highlights the selected menu item by a client side script, which is a lot more performance friendly
• FlexMenu: Our tests indicate that this menu control is the fastest if you have a sophisticated XSLT. It seems like Ektron simply provided a flexible menu control specifically for XML transformations.

We recommend the use of the SmartMenu, and if you insist in using XSLT to display a menu, use the FlexMenu as the alternative.

3. Make Use of the .NET Caching Mechanism

A simple thing for developers to set, isn’t it? Well, you can’t imagine how many sites we’ve seen without any caching beyond what the default settings allow. There is so much more to cache, it is almost a crime not to make use of it in our technology-driven age.

Ultimately, the above lists are just a few main performance issues that we have found with many Ektron sites. The items above alone can improve the site’s performances by up to 50%. However, this list is far from complete by any means. Hardware, Paging, Deadlocks, Server Environment, and even Bandwidth need to all be reviewed in order to improve performances.

Fast Surfing!

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