I briefly looked at Canvas in V4 and now I'm developing with V4.5.2 I've had a look again to see if it is worth suggesting to editors as a means of editing content.
I've found it completely unusable in IE8 or FF in that clicking on things seems to have very little effect.
I've searched the forum and found many other people with problems and very found very little in the way of documentation.
At the moment it seems it's certainly not a part of the product I can introduce to clients although I hope I am wrong. Is anyone using it?
You should for sure be able to use it. I have read that there can be some issues with some of the browsers, but canvas should work in most of the browsers. It does though depend on how you are rendering your content in your templates. Eg. canvas will not work if you just render a richtext editor with a <xsl:value-of> in XSLT.
You need to use the umbraco.library:Item og and umbraco:Item in the templates or something like that.
But could you give a little more details of the problem you're having?
Do you have all of the contet in your page wrapped in a serverside form?
in example does your master page look like this
<body> <form runat="server">
<!-- HTML and Content placeholders here -->
</form> </body>
You need to wrap it in a serverside form in order to get it to work. That the one thing I'm sure of. Maybe there are other things you need to be aware of as well besides the things Kim and I have mentioned.
Thanks for your comments. It would be useful to know where to find information about these little template design requirements for Canvas.
My master template does make use of a runat server form although one of my problems is that the Click here to edit metaDescription.Click here to edit metaKeywords. does nothing and I can see that these conrols are not being placed within my form which starts a bit further on down the template.
Links on the page do not take me to other pages, are they supposed to?
I did have a problem editing a rich text area when I first tried it but that seems to be OK now. I use <umbraco:Item field="XXX" runat="server"></umbraco:Item> for those.
I would be interested in how your experiences with Canvas editing went, I am trying it out now.
I found the templates actually pretty easy to get working, you just need to ensure everything inherits from the umbraco Default.master, and put a server-side form in there.
It seems to work fine for simple content, but if you have a lot of macros doing clever things around the place then obviously they won't be editable; this does potentially make the experience a bit confusing for the user - "Why can't I edit that text? It's just text!" - you could get around this with careful design and limiting use of macros I guess, but it is something to be aware of.
However, it's very hard to recommend simply because you can't navigate the site in Canvas mode because the hyperlinks are all disabled. You can of course use the admin tree to choose new pages to edit, but that seems to eliminate all of the nice-intuitive-interface point of Canvas editing in the first place - and even then there is no good interface to return to the admin screen - as everything these days pops up in a new tab it is not immediately obvious you have to close that tab to get back to the tree, then right click the next page, select "Edit in Canvas"...
I would have thought the target audience for Canvas editing was non-technical types, set up as editors, who just want to browse the site fixing errors and updating content they come across, and as you can't actually browse the site, you can't use it for that at all.
To clarify the issues with macros a bit, I have created a design that has a portfolio page doctype, with children as portfolio items.
The portfolio items have a property which is their page content, and a property that is a brief precis of the item.
The precis for each item is displayed using a macro to generate a navigator for the portfolio.
So, that precis property is never displayed anywhere in an Umbraco page field, and is therefore completely inaccessible to the Canvas editing - this makes the main portfolio page completely uneditable apart from the page name, despite having a lot of content - this is quite confusing to a casual editor.
Now, I have no idea how you would fix that using the current editing system. The only way I could think of doing it is similar to the little content editing system Unify (http://unify.unitinteractive.com/ - I am not affiliated), where the front end is entirely a Javascript overlay, and items are marked with a CSS class.
You could perhaps flag editable regions with microformats declaring their ID and property alias with the editor could pick up and use; I could then adjust my macro to output these microformats thus making the content editable within the macro.
This is just thinking aloud you understand, I'm sure there are many problems with this approach! Not least the fact it would involve a whole new Canvas system :o)
Canvas. Does it actually work?
I briefly looked at Canvas in V4 and now I'm developing with V4.5.2 I've had a look again to see if it is worth suggesting to editors as a means of editing content.
I've found it completely unusable in IE8 or FF in that clicking on things seems to have very little effect.
I've searched the forum and found many other people with problems and very found very little in the way of documentation.
At the moment it seems it's certainly not a part of the product I can introduce to clients although I hope I am wrong. Is anyone using it?
Regards,
Matt
Hi Matt.
You should for sure be able to use it. I have read that there can be some issues with some of the browsers, but canvas should work in most of the browsers. It does though depend on how you are rendering your content in your templates. Eg. canvas will not work if you just render a richtext editor with a <xsl:value-of> in XSLT.
You need to use the umbraco.library:Item og and umbraco:Item in the templates or something like that.
But could you give a little more details of the problem you're having?
/Kim A
Hi Matt
Do you have all of the contet in your page wrapped in a serverside form?
in example does your master page look like this
<body>
<form runat="server">
<!-- HTML and Content placeholders here -->
</form>
</body>
You need to wrap it in a serverside form in order to get it to work. That the one thing I'm sure of. Maybe there are other things you need to be aware of as well besides the things Kim and I have mentioned.
/Jan
Hello all,
Thanks for your comments. It would be useful to know where to find information about these little template design requirements for Canvas.
My master template does make use of a runat server form although one of my problems is that the Click here to edit metaDescription. Click here to edit metaKeywords. does nothing and I can see that these conrols are not being placed within my form which starts a bit further on down the template.
Links on the page do not take me to other pages, are they supposed to?
I did have a problem editing a rich text area when I first tried it but that seems to be OK now.
I use <umbraco:Item field="XXX" runat="server"></umbraco:Item> for those.
Regards,
Matt
I would be interested in how your experiences with Canvas editing went, I am trying it out now.
I found the templates actually pretty easy to get working, you just need to ensure everything inherits from the umbraco Default.master, and put a server-side form in there.
It seems to work fine for simple content, but if you have a lot of macros doing clever things around the place then obviously they won't be editable; this does potentially make the experience a bit confusing for the user - "Why can't I edit that text? It's just text!" - you could get around this with careful design and limiting use of macros I guess, but it is something to be aware of.
However, it's very hard to recommend simply because you can't navigate the site in Canvas mode because the hyperlinks are all disabled. You can of course use the admin tree to choose new pages to edit, but that seems to eliminate all of the nice-intuitive-interface point of Canvas editing in the first place - and even then there is no good interface to return to the admin screen - as everything these days pops up in a new tab it is not immediately obvious you have to close that tab to get back to the tree, then right click the next page, select "Edit in Canvas"...
I would have thought the target audience for Canvas editing was non-technical types, set up as editors, who just want to browse the site fixing errors and updating content they come across, and as you can't actually browse the site, you can't use it for that at all.
To clarify the issues with macros a bit, I have created a design that has a portfolio page doctype, with children as portfolio items.
The portfolio items have a property which is their page content, and a property that is a brief precis of the item.
The precis for each item is displayed using a macro to generate a navigator for the portfolio.
So, that precis property is never displayed anywhere in an Umbraco page field, and is therefore completely inaccessible to the Canvas editing - this makes the main portfolio page completely uneditable apart from the page name, despite having a lot of content - this is quite confusing to a casual editor.
Now, I have no idea how you would fix that using the current editing system. The only way I could think of doing it is similar to the little content editing system Unify (http://unify.unitinteractive.com/ - I am not affiliated), where the front end is entirely a Javascript overlay, and items are marked with a CSS class.
You could perhaps flag editable regions with microformats declaring their ID and property alias with the editor could pick up and use; I could then adjust my macro to output these microformats thus making the content editable within the macro.
This is just thinking aloud you understand, I'm sure there are many problems with this approach! Not least the fact it would involve a whole new Canvas system :o)
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