What's New in WOW - Category: Programming Tricks

Address Entry Tricks for the Public Education Database

Steve Johnson and the IT Group has prepared a new Application Note entitled “Address Entry Tricks for the Public Education Database” that includes a special section for units in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well. As you are entering your 2015 courses into the database, you may find this application note of particular value.

The application note explains in detail how the PE Dashboard validates the addresses you enter, and gives you tips and tricks for getting validation almost every time, with the markers on the automatically generated PE Course Flyer and Google Maps link, to the degree possible, accurately reflecting the true location of your course’s meeting place.

The latest copy of this application note can always be found online at the following permalink:

http://wow.uscgaux.info/user_docs/PE_Database_Address_Entry_Tricks.pdf

As always, if you have difficulty entering any address, after consulting with and following this new Application Note, please use the provided “Feedback/Bug Report” button at the bottom of the PE Dashboard.

Cute Editor Doesn’t display Properly in IE11

Internet Explorer 11 (which comes with Windows 8.1) does not display the Cute editor properly when trying to edit a WOW announcement. To cause it to function properly you have to set it into compatibility Mode.

PE Course Address Won't Take? Try This

Occasionally, PE officers trying to enter a course into WOW's National Public Education Course Database get an error message that they have a bad address, which they KNOW (wink, wink) is correct.

The first line of defense is to check the address with the U.S. Postal Service, at their "Look Up a ZIP Code" page. Then, use the resulting address for entering into the PE Course Dashboard, letter for letter, copying the same abbreviations (ST for Street, FT for Fort, etc.). This will usually do the trick.

However, some addresses resist even this. WOW uses Yahoo!'s geocoding Web service to validate addresses and get the meeting location's latitude and longitude for the marker on the map found on the course flyer. The reason WOW will not accept a questionable address is to avoid producing a map that shows the location of the course in, say, the Canary Islands. But Yahoo! is actually more discriminating than the Post Office, and on occasion will find an address that it believes exists in more two or more places, the Zip Code notwithstanding

In such a case the PE Dashboard will reject the address and say that it is ambiguous. What you can do then is to give it a little help: simply tack on the county name after the city, in the city field.

For example, if the address "322 Huff Street, Aransas Pass, TX, 78336" comes back ambiguous (it does), simply tack on the county name (San Patricio) right after the city name, in the "City" field:

Before: "Aransas Pass"
After: "Aransas Pass, San Patricio County"

You can also use the IT Directorates Geotest Utility to experiment with addresses (or find the geodesic coordinates -- i.e., latitude and longitude -- of your flotilla's meeting location for entry into AuxDirectory, etc.) and see how Yahoo's geocoder acts with a specific address. Sometimes, with a little experimentation, you can find the right "tweak" on the address (such as changing "Fort" to "FT" or Harbor to "Hbr") that does the trick.

The WOW Geotest Utility is at: wow.uscgaux.info/geotest.php.

Finally, note that if your course is being held on a military base, the official USPS address of that location is that of that base, such as "McClellan AFB, CA" rather than the surrounding city.

New: Roles-based Pages

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

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

“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

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 <whatever...>". 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

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.

Sort Order on Calendar Pages; Best Practices

We recommend that you use a calendar like Google Calendar for your unit, and simply embed the calendar link right in the page. We recommend the "Agenda" view, which displays events in a list, ordered from earliest date to latest date, rather than a classical "tabular" calendar. But it's your choice.

However, if you insist on creating an agenda-style calendar using the Announcement Editor, you must be aware of the following strategies and best practices, in order to get your calendar to appear professional, and sorted in the right order:

Use one (1) announcement per event.
Put the date and information about the event in the "CaptionField", like this: "04 APR: This is my event".
Check the "Show on Page" checkbox to force this caption to be displayed on the page as your calendar entry.
Set the "Start Date" to the date of the event. WOW sorts calendar pages by Start Date, not by Sequence (Sequence is ignored).
Set the "End Date" to the day after the event, if you want the event to disappear automatically after it is over. If, instead, you want all events, future and past, to remain in the calendar all year, then set the End Date to "December 31, <current year>".

The formatting in #2 is very important; if you want the events to more or less line up vertically, they you should assure that all dates are written with two digits (i.e., leading zero) and all months are abbreviated with three (3) characters.

The body of the announcement will normally be left empty, unless you have additional information to add. Be sure to keep the font sizes in the additional information at the default sizes. If you go larger, your page will look amateurish. And avoid brightly-colored fonts. Stick to the WOW pallette.

Addresses and Maps in the PE Calendar: Having Problems?

Updated April 27, 2012

The PE Calendar uses a geocoder service from Yahoo! to double-check the addresses and Zip Codes you enter. 99% of the time, it works fabulously, and prevents numerous errors from being made. Occasionally, however, it can be tempermental. When it is, try the following:

Enter your address without the Zip Code, and then use the 5-digit Zip Code that shows up in the error message.
Use our raw geocoding test utility to check out how the address wishes to be represented. It's at http://wow.uscgaux.info/geotest.php. Simply type in your address freeform, with commas, and leave out the Zip Code (it will be provided). The address that you get is the one that will work in the PE calendar.
Check with the U.S. Postal Service here. Enter your address without a Zip Code to start. If the USPS reports "The address you provided is not recognized by the US Postal Service as an address we serve", then you have the address wrong, whatever you think. See "Common Errors", next section.

Common Errors
Here are the most common address errors made during address data, in decreasing order of frequency:

You are putting an address (e.g., 1234 Main St.) in the "Location" field. The location field, required, is the name of the building or meeting place, such as "Fire Station Room 235". It may not be a street address. The field immediately below "Location" is called "Address", and it is called that for a reason. That is where you put the first line of the street address.
You are attempting to enter a Location in the Address field (opposite of #1).
You are omitting North, South, East, or West (or N, S, E, or W) from a street address. Even though you've lived there for over 40 years and think of City Hall as 100 Main Street, the Post Office (and our geocoder) insist you enter it "100 N. Main St." if that is the legal address.
You are attempting to enter a street address on a military base using the city that the base is in. For example, you enter "Location" as "Travis AFB Youth Center" and the full address as "310 Fairchild Drive, Fairfield, CA 94535". This will fail; the use of the city "Fairfield" in which Travis AFB is located is incorrect. Instead, for "City", you must enter either "Travis AFB", or "Travis Air Force Base". This is consistent across the country; the "city" for any military base is the name of the base itself.

Maps in the Flyer
The marker showing the course location in the PE flyer is also from Yahoo's geocoding service. It, however, takes the latitude and longitude provided based upon the address, and then tells Google Maps (which actually renders the map insert on the flyer) where to place the marker. For some reason, Yahoo's geocoding of addreesses to lat/lon is sometimes a little off.

We are working on switching the map marker over to Google's geocoder, but due to higher-priority projects, that might not get done as soon as you would like.

Custom Icons Now Possible at Top of Left Menu

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.

PE Calendar: Entering the Same Course with Different Dates (Clone)

If you are offering the same Public Boating Course several times during the year, you or your PE officer may enter it one time, and then "clone" it repeatedly, changing the dates, etc. for each additional copy, as required.

To do so, in the PE Dashboard, simply EDIT the course you want to clone, change the necessary information, and use the 'SAVE AS NEW' button.

This technique may also be used after a course has concluded, and you wish to re-use the information for a future course. In such a case, do not simply change the dates and use SAVE, for this does not send a new "Notice of Intent to Teach" to the DSP-PE, but use the SAVE AS NEW button.

Adding Your Own Content to the Default Home Page

Many of you have expressed interest in "hacking" the default home page to add you own photographs, or additional content.

The default home page is built-in, and cannot be edited per se. However, there is nothing preventing you from creating your own home page with exactly the same underlying code as is used on the default home page. All you need is the code. Well, here it is:

http://wow.uscgaux.info/documents/story.zip

Here is how you use it:

Go to the configuration dashboard, and start with a default home page (no announcements);
Click on the link above, and download the story.zip file to your desktop;
Double-click open the zip file, and either drag the story.txt file to your desktop, and open it, or simply click it open right in the zip window, if your version of zip allows that.
Copy all the code in story.txt. For safety, use CTRL-A (PC) or CMD-A (Mac), and do an Edit > Copy from the menu, or a CTRL-C (PC) or CMD-C (Mac);
In WOW, on the home page dashboard, create a new announcement; In the editor window, click on "HTML" at the bottom;
Click your mouse in the editor window, and use CTRL-V (PC) or CMD-V (Mac) to paste the text you copied from story.txt.
SAVE the announcement, and Return to Unit Page.

If you did it right, the home page will look identical to the default home page. However, now you may go back and either edit that announcement, or add additional announcements on the home page to customize it as you see fit.