Alex Little

Been a bit slack over the last 2 or 3 weeks getting anything posted up here, as I’ve been away for a few days and most of the work I’ve been doing probably isn’t that interesting to anyone else! I’ve spent a fair bit of time moving a lot of our web and database services over to our new cluster system and getting all of that tested out. I’ve been updating some of the code within the Knowledge Network to make it a bit easier to move. The KN was previously using the eWebEditPro inline html editor, a we’ve had that a fair while now (about 5 years), but we’ve now decided to switch to using the FCKEditor as it seems to be getting a lot of use and seems pretty good (and it’s open source & free!). We’ve been using the FCKEditor on one of our other sites and have had no issues with it- that was using v2 RC3, so I’ve now got it all upgraded to use the most recent version (v2.2). The only slightly fiddly bit was getting the image upload to work exactly how I wanted it, as we’ve got the images on another server to the web cluster, so I had to play around with the security settings.
The other couple of things I’ve done with the KN is finally got it searching PDF documents properly, we’re using SQL Server full text indexing, so inserting the actual files into the database for indexing, so we can also search and filter the results easily (which we couldn’t do with a file system search). Installing the Adobe IFilter for indexing was all a bit of a doddle really!
Finally, the last thing I did was update the external site search. We were previously using Swish to index other sites we wanted to offer search results from, but this of course meant building and maintaining our our indexes of these sites, so I’ve switched over to using the OU’s own search engine to get these results.
All this seems to be working well (so far!)

Have now got the spellerpages application working correctly with the FCK Editor and ColdFusion. The solution had been emailed to me following a help message I put up on the spellerpages sourceforge forum. You can download the fix/patch from the sourceforge site.

Still been spending most of my time working on the Learning Design project (hence why I’ve not been posting much stuff here!)

Been spending a little time trying to get the SpellerPages integrated with the FCK Editor using the ColdFusion server script. It’s not being as straightforward as I’d hoped! Am slowly but surely getting there – there doesn’t seem to have been many people who’ve used CF over php for the spell checking – so once I’ve got it sorted I’ll post up what I had to do to get it to work correctly.

After a little fiddling around I’ve got the FCKEditor up and running. The only bit that needed a bit of effort to get working correctly was the image upload – I was getting an ‘XML request error: Internal Server Error [500]‘ and found the reason was due to it trying to read the wrong (invalid) directory, so needed to have a look at the FCKEditor\editor\filemanager\browser\default\connectors\cfm\connector.cfm file and adjust the directory it’s using in there to get it to work – shame the error messages aren’t a bit more meaningful! Now looking at how I can integrate this with the ‘Speller Pages’ spell checker.

I’m currently looking at how we can make use of the FCKEditor for allowing people to edit pages on our IET public and intranet websites.