Web page editor – v3.4 Knowledge Base

The Web page editor function that is accessed at System>Utilities>Administration utilities, provides a means of creating and editing stand alone web pages that can be accessed using a known URL. Web pages in this directory will have a URL that can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet in the format

http://<YourRefTrackerDomain>/web/public/<filename>

Files placed in this location will NOT be indexed by well behaving search engines, which means that they can be used for internal purposes such as documentation.

Sub directories can be created by Altarama for hosted customers, or your hardware system manager for in-house customers, so that files in this directory structure can be organised into groups.

Creating Your Own Subject Guides/web pages

You can create your own custom web pages within your RefTracker installation. You can use these pages for any purpose appropriate to your organisation including internal documentation and subject guides. Please note that the pages are not indexed by search engines so internal documentation is the best use. Click here (parameters 6.15 and 16) for more information about integrating RefTracker with your subject guides or other informational web pages that need to be viewed by your end users.

The following descriptions uses the term Subject guides to describe an example of what you might use this web page capability for.

To do this, go to System->Utilities->Administration Utilities->Web page editor:

You then see the following page. The box on the left, the ‘Template’ box, provides some basic templates you can modify to create your own Subject Guides pages. On the right side, you see the ‘Public’ directory – where you will make your changes. Click on the ‘subjectguides’ directory underneath ‘Public’.

You also have the ability to rename folders – to do so, right-click, and choose from the dropdown menu the action you’d like to perform. Please do not rename the ‘subjectguides’ directory.

The directories listed under the subjectguides directory (as seen above) can be renamed. You can also choose to add your own directory, as long as it’s in the subjectguides folder. You may not have empty directories, and you cannot have a second tier directory. However, you can include a Subject Guide template to a directory, and use it as a basis to get you started. A basic text editor is provided for you to modify your own web pages.

Additionally, you have the ability to directly modify the HTML. You can also have as many files in this directory as you need.

Here’s an example of the above setup:

You can upload any file into this directory structure, and using the Web page editor function you can amend those files or even create entirely new ones based on a template that you can edit. However, beware, adding files and deleting may result in IIS detecting a change and RefTracker restarting, so use this function out of operating hours.

Reasons why you might use this new feature include:

to create information to be used in answers to questions provided through RefTracker where that information is better provided and maintained as a link to a web page or set of web pages.
to load documents that you want to refer to regularly in RefTracker answers by its URL (you may have used the RefTracker Publish attachments function to do that in this past, but the publish attachments are sent as attachments that can cause mail box space problems).
wrapped in an iframe and used as a webpage for system-wide notice/policies/questions.
to create and maintain some internal documentation like the policies for using your RefTracker system.
Altarama may even use the uppermost /web directory to make helpful web pages available to our customers, for example it is a good place to make the RefChatter example widget web page available for customers using both RefTracker request management and RefChatter online reference, so that the file can be easily edited to meet each customer’s own requirements.

This structure is not meant to replace your corporate web pages, but you can use it to supplement them when access to your corporate web pages is not simple or timely. The pages in the /web directories are protected from being indexed by search engines so this function will not circumvent any corporate controls making information searchable from the web – it’s a safe place where documents can be made available to only those you provide the URL to.

Importantly RefTracker uses this web page editor as the tool for editing its SubjectGuides functionality. SubjectGuides is a very simple to use content management system that maintains a two level table of contents for pages that you might want to make available to your staff and/or clients. Click here for information about implementing or modifying your SubjectGuides (free for full RefTracker customers and available at a small additional price for Express customers) .

There may be many more uses for this function in the future and we look forward to hearing how else it could be used from our customers!

This function is used in much the same way as the Template editing and Text file editing functions, but with a few additional features as follows:

Files within the Public pane can be previewed by double clicking them, by selecting them and clicking the Preview function in the header bar, or by right clicking them and choosing Open.

When you click on a file in the Public pane, the URL for that file displays above the Public pane. You can cut and paste the URL for that file to provide access to it from other places e.g. in a RefTracker response.

The Template directory currently provides only one file – a template for creating new web pages from scratch. You can edit this template to create a template that provides a standard layout for all of the pages that you create in this directory.However in the future other files may be distributed by Altarama in this directory, for example, the example web page providing access to our RefChatter product may be inserted here to facilitate easier setup for customers of both products.

To create a new standalone web page, create a copy of the template provided in the master directory, then rename it to your file name of choice.

You can also add files to this directory structure, by Uploading them directly from this screen. The Upload function works exactly as it does for the File upload/download function, by clicking on the “Upload” button in the header of the Local pane.

To edit a page, click the file’s name in the right side of the Local pane and click the ‘edit’ button. Once loaded, the contents of the file you wish to edit will appear in an edit panel at the bottom of the screen. Editing the document is done in the same way as is provided by the Text file editor function with the system opening in Design mode. Click here for more information about using this HTML editor.

An HTML editor is also available by clicking HTML in the link below the editing box. Use the HTML editing function for amending your file at the HTML level or adding to it using pre-existing HTML formatted text.

Exercise

When you have successfully investigated the web file creation and editing functionality click on the link back to the Utilities menu.