Opening a link in a new window
posted on:01/09/2008
When developing your department website, you may wish to have a link from your navigation menu pop up in a new window. To accomplish this in Toolkit 2, simply place an additional parameter on the line in the navbar.txt file for that link.
For example, the screenshot below shows a portion of a navbar.txt file.
Notice the menu item labeled Code of Ethics. A semicolon separates the label (Code of Ethics) from it's URL (ethics.cfm). To add an additional parameter to this line, we will place another semicolon after the URL, and then type the value of the parameter. This is shown below:
We've added a semicolon, the word "other." This is all that is required to cause a link to pop up in a new window. When the page is generated, the value of the parameter becomes the relationship attribute of the link. In other words, the link that will be generated in HTML for this menu item will be:
<a href="ethics.cfm" rel="other">Code of Ethics</a>
Using the UWF E-Calendar Application
posted on:11/16/2007
The Marketing/Communications department maintains a campus calendar to announce events pertinent to all of UWF. If you'd like to incorporate a calendar into your department's website, you may find it convenient to make use of this official campus calendar rather than create your own.
To put the campus calendar on a web page, you'll need to call a custom ColdFusion tag developed by ITS and named "call E-Cal." The basic ColdFusion syntax is as follows:
<cf_callecal>
Placing this line of code in a web page will cause the entire campus calendar for the current week, to be displayed. What you'd probably prefer to do however, is to display only events that pertain to your particular department. To do that, you need to add a few special attributes to the ColdFusion tag. All of the possible attributes for this tag are described in the tag's documentation page. Let's look at some of the important ones.
Unit Type
Each calendar event is associated with a particular department, or an organization, or a person, etc. In the ITS database, departments are actually called "clans" so to display the calendar for a department, you must first set the unit type attribute equal to "clan."
<cf_callecal unittype="clan">
Unit Scope
With the unit type parameter set, you must now specify exactly which department the calendar should display. In the ITS database, each department is represented by a unique identification number. The easiest way to find your department's ID number is to look at the URL parameters on the department account information page. For example, in the screenshot shown below, I have loaded the account information page and placed my mouse cursor over the admissions department. As you can see, at the bottom of the browser window, the status bar shows that the unit scope for this department is 82.
So to show the calendar for the Admissions department, I would use the following code:
<cf_callecal unittype="clan" unitscope="82">
Show Small Calendar
Another useful feature of the e-calendar is the ability to display a miniature monthly calendar as a user-interface aid.
To make use of this feature, set the attribute, ShowSmallCal to "1"
<cf_callecal unittype="clan" unitscope="82" showsmallcal="1">
There are quite a few other available attributes to change the way the calendar is displayed. You can alter the color scheme and font size, specify the number of days that are displayed, and even allow the user to search the calendar. All of these are described in the e-cal documentation. Additionally, an example template is included in the web presence toolkits. It can be found in the widgets directory.
Notice the menu item labeled Code of Ethics. A semicolon separates the label (Code of Ethics) from it's URL (ethics.cfm). To add an additional parameter to this line, we will place another semicolon after the URL, and then type the value of the parameter. This is shown below:
