HYpertext Monicsoft Net Shaper
Tips'n'Tricks

What?

• ...
  How?
  

  What?

• Skip the opening of the links and pictures palette...
  How?
  Yeah, how? :) this product is in griping alpha, remember? If you get an idea on this, gimme a call.

  What?

• Moving your site area is very simple...
  How?
  make the new folder; transfer the contents of your hymns folder to the hymns folder in the new directory; tar or zip recursively the contents of the site area as it is (for backup/seurity reasons), then recursively remove it; edit the file custom.pl in your cgi folder and change the $hymnsf and $hymnsu variables to match the new address of your site area; then open the maintenance document and click the Generate Site button.

  What?

• Make a dummy text file when you have to generate complicated data.
  How?
  You may have noticed that it's a pain in the rear to fill in data for repeating fields; while I work on a more elegant solution to this problem, do the following to keep the process as error-free as possible:
  1. Select and Copy the template for the first record that appears in the textarea;
  2. Open a small text editor (like Notepad, on Windows and SimpleText on Macs); make a new (dummy) document, if one is not automatically created;
  3. Paste n times (where n is the number of records); the template should appear n times in the dummy document;
  4. (optional) I suggest you keep the TextWrap off; it's more difficult to move around and see all the record contents, but it keeps the records separate on their own lines; if you MUST use TextWrap, press Enter twice at the end of each record-line, so the records are separated in old-fashioned text paragraphs;
  5. For each record, replace each variable name with its value (or, if you have many records with the same -or similar- data, do step 3 only once do step 5, then copy the line and paste it n times);
  6. Check the data and delete any additional <Enter>s you may have added during step 4;
  7. Select All, Copy, switch back to the browser you use for data entry, select the template in the text area (if not already selected), and paste;
  8. Fill in any additional data fields, take a deep breath and preview :)

  What?

• Keep track of your template names and data fields; you CANNOT have the same template name in the same folder and it's not a good idea to have the same data field in the same template...
  How?
  While you're designing, use a list like the names.txt that comes with HTMNS, to list template and data names, listed per section of your area; you can either keep the file in electronic format and update it as you go, or print it out, one area section/subarea per page, two columns (data and templates) and keep it in a folder at hand, to pencil in the new names you create; keep that folder with your maintainance materials.

  What?

• If your editor supports SSI, you could (among other kool things: check out the ssixxx chunks) keep down the size of your area...
  How?
  Server-Side Includes make your areas smaller by having the server parse files (usually the ones with .shtml extension) and include one file in another. In this case, define the templates so that instead of writing a repeating chunk (like headers or footers) it points to it through SSI.

  What?

• It's a good idea to save browsing time by separating the templates that you use most often for a certain task from the others...
  How?
  Add manually subdirectories to the ts directory and place groups of templates in them; for example, make an 'htmlts' directory to keep all the HTML chunks which come with HYMNS, an 'lists' directory to keep the list-chunks that you create, etc.

  What?

• You could provide pointers to the HYMNS walk-through and OOD pages, as well as to these tips, as part of your company Web tutorials; also check my Multimedia/Web Workshop...
  How?
  Just add pointers to these places in your tutorials.

  What?

• Work on different areas with HYMNS
  How?
  There are two ways: (a) make HYMNS the root of all the areas you want to develop (you can consider making it the root of your server), and assign different teams for each sub-area; (b) have different customization files (e.g. custom-home.pl, custom-cad.pl) with different $hymnsf and $hymnsu settings and cp to custom.pl the one for the area you plan to edit.

  What?

• For the beginning design stages, when an area tends to change all the time, you may modify the default template to include an EDIT link (or button) so while browsing the pages you can go directly to editing the page you're currently viewing...
  How?
  Add the appropriate link to index.ts (or whichever you decide to call your default template (sheesh! ;) )

  What?

• If you're building an intranet, you could give users more access to the maintainer's interface, especially to the data editor; that way they could each add the data they're responsible for and avoid the bottleneck represented by the Webadmin team (or person)...
  How?
  Edit the server security file(s) for the hymns directory to include the names or IPs of your users' workstations.

Enjoy!

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Walk-through tutorial ]===[ HYMNS Page
Examples of HYMNS at work: [BG-BIO] [WARP] [SESC] [KCP] [V-TOUR]

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