What's New in WOW - Category: New Feature

Your Unit Meets Irregularly But Your WOW Website Assumes You Meet Monthly: The Fix...

2013-04-26T23:56:06Z

WOW gets its information about the meeting place, day, and time of you flotilla, division or district from the "Unit Record" in AuxDirectory (AuxOfficer). Your flotilla commander, when logged onto AuxDirectory can change this, and other information, which will then show up in WOW the next time you open a fresh Web browser and go to your site.

WOW expects you unit to meet monthly, and on the "About this Unit" page, automatically tacks on "of each month" after the meeting day that you enter. For example, if your meeting day in AuxDirectory is "3rd Monday", then WOW displays "3rd Monday of each month".

What do you do if your unit meets irregularly, and you want to suppress that "of each month" text? Easy: simply enter a pound sign ("#") at the end of the meeting day field, and WOW will suppress the extra text.

For example, Division 095-45 meets every other month, from January. When the SO-CS entered "3rd Thurs in Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep, and Nov" she got "3rd Thurs in Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep, and Nov of each month" -- a nonsensical result.

However, when she entered "3rd Thurs in Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep, and Nov#" (note the #-sign after "Nov") WOW displayed "3rd Thurs in Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep, and Nov".

This can be useful for Districts, for example, that have four (4) meetings a year on specific dates: "Jan 23, Apr 15, July 23, Nov 1. Other times by announcement.#" entered into AuxDirectory will reproduce only that text (minus the #-sign).

If your meeting times are also irregular, leave the meeting time field blank. You can add the time in the meeting day field, if desperate, as in "Jan 23 (0900), Apr 15 (1300), July 23 (0900), Nov 1 (1030). Other times by announcement.#".

New: Roles-based Pages

2012-11-10T23:12:34Z

Roles-based Pages allow a webmaster to create protected pages that only appear in the left navigation menu when a "Member Zone" user is both “logged on” and has either a specific qualification (INT, AIROBS, etc.) and/or a specific office (FSO-CS, DSO-CS, etc.).

Role-based pages can be used whenever you want to share information with a select group of individuals or if you need to share sensitive information with a select group. For instance, you might create a page about auxiliary patrols that you want to share only with the boat crew. A DSO-CS folks may want to share specific instructions for updating flotilla websites that is only of interest to FSO-CS or SO-CS. Interpreters (INT) may want to share information on deployments that would be applicable to fellow interpreters and the DIR-I. The list is endless.

All of this is explained in a new Application Note entitled: WOW II Pushbutton Website Platform: Using Role-based Pages. A copy of this application note may be downloaded from the documentation page in this dashboard.

Finally! WOW Does Email Forms

2012-07-25T06:54:58Z

Have you been wanting to create a form on your WOW site that visitors can fill out and submit to you? Now it is possible using WOW Email Forms. Although this is an advanced technique, it is not difficult to quickly create a response form that automatically is emailed by WOW to one or more persons of your choosing. The feature comes with enhancements to the Cute Editor for forms and tables.

Read all about it by clicking Documentation to the left, and downloading the Application Note. Be sure the also read up on Hidden Pages, a technique you will use for a confirmation page for your form.

New: "Smart Tags" for Maintenance-free Pages

2012-07-25T06:53:59Z

“Smart Tags” in a WOW website are pieces of text that you can put into your Web page, on any announcement (post), that are replaced when the page is displayed with “dynamic” information. Examples include unit staff members, contact information, and even personalization information for the member logged on -- all drawn in real time from AuxDirectory. Make any page with personnel information "maintenance free." Download the Application Note under "Documentation", to the left.

Hidden Pages Revealed

2012-07-20T01:20:40Z

WOW II now has the ability to support hidden pages. Hidden pages are regular WOW pages that do not show up in the left menu, but are otherwise part of your site, and can be linked to.

Hidden pages are particularly useful as confirmation pages for WOW Forms, which prefer to have a page for the user to land on after entering a form, saying something like "Your form has been emailed. Thank you for your ". However, you may also use a hidden page like any other page. You just have to arrange links to the hidden page from visible or protected pages.

All of this is explained in a new Application Note entitled: WOW II Pushbutton Website Platform: Using Hidden Pages. A copy of this application note may be downloaded from the documentation page in this dashboard. While you are there, pick up any other documentation that you have not read in a while. Click on Documentation to the left.

Custom Pages Now Feature Human-readable Slugs; Push Button Update

2012-05-30T16:04:47Z

Since its introduction, WOW II has featured unlimited Custom pages. You may have noticed that the generated link to these pages is always a unique, ten-digit number(*) as follows:

http://wow.uscgaux.info/content.php?unit=115-12-05&category=1324573457

This number is then associated with the menu entry and all of the content (announcement) entries in the WOW database, enabling the correct page to be constructed dynamically. Unfortunately, a ten-digit number is not particularly intuitive or memorable.

WOW has now been upgraded to use slugs - human-readable phrases based upon the actual menu entry - instead of the ten-digit number. For example, if you create a custom menu item "Get a VSC Today!", the slug will be "get-a-vsc-today", and page's URL will be:

http://wow.uscgaux.info/content.php?unit=115-12-05&category=get-a-vsc-today

Slugs are popular because they enable search engines -- which treat the words in the slug as keywords -- to find the page.

All custom pages created after May 30, 2012 will have slugs in their URL. Custom pages bearing the old ten-digit category code may be converted with a new push button utility that appears in the WOW Dashboard, called "Rewrite Custom Slugs". Look for it under "WOW Utilities" in the Dashboard's left menu. Simply click this "link" and all of the custom page URLs in your unit's site will be converted. In addition, all links to converted pages anywhere in the entire WOW II system will be converted as well. This means, for example, if a flotilla website contained a link to a custom WOW page on a district site -- as an external menu item or coded into an anouncement -- this link will be converted in the database so that it will continue to point to the correct page.

Webmasters, however, should be cautioned that if you published a link to a custom page outside the WOW system, for example on an AIRS website, on a third-party site, or even in a brochure or flyer, that link will be broken after you click "Rewrite Custom Slugs". To aid you in manually converting these, the Dashboard produces a cross-reference report in the "Rewrite Custom Slugs" utility.

All units are asked to use the "Rewrite Custom Slugs" utility to update their site as soon as possible.

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(*) Geeks among you might be interested to know that the ten-digit number is actually the number of seconds since the beginning of the UNIX epoch (0000 GMT on January 1, 1970) at the instant that you created the custom menu item. For further reading, see Unix Time in Wikipedia. For more about slugs, read "Slug (Web Publishing)" from the same source.

Custom Icons Now Possible at Top of Left Menu

2012-04-27T01:07:44Z

If you would like to emulate some of the national departments that have their department seal at the top of the left menu system (for example, the IT group at http://itgroup.cgaux.org), you can now do it.

Take your official district, department or flotilla seal -- high quality, of course -- and make it exactly 130x130 pixels. If your seal is not round, then crop to the widest dimension, resize to 130px along that dimension, and then crop the other dimension to 130px as well. Your background can be white (#FFFFFF) or transparent. Save it as a JPEG file, with the file extension ".jpg".

Next, rename the file based upon your canonical unit number, except without the dashes. For example, if your unit is 114-12-04, then rename the file:

1141204_icon.jpg

So, the file name is your canonical unit number without the dashes, with "_icon.jpg" tacked on. If you name this image anything else, this won't work.

Finally, you need to upload the image to WOW. Simply enter the configuration dashboard, edit any announcement on any page, and click on the "image upload" icon (the mountain with pencil). Browse to the file wherever you left it on your computer, and upload it. Do not insert the image into the announcement you have opened! Just cancel out of the image upload dialog, and click on the "Return to Unit Site" button. If you did everything correctly, the custom icon will appear at the top of the left menu, in place of the AuxWeb icon.