Hello Cheeky Man,

you're right, thank you for the clarification about the PHP-based reserved area.

Hello Michele and Cheeky Man

 Thank you for your answers.

My understanding was that a user database was better handled using MySQL. I have no familiarity with PHP and/or MySQL however to clarify this. 

There are widely available scripts for user access using PHP, and I assume all that is required is server side support for this, however storage of multiple users is unclear. I would like the facility to grant and store access individually, and also filter unwanted guests. Account & password retrieval is also important hence MySQL appears to be a logical choice for this but as stated I have no experience of PHP or MySQL to validate this. I am sure this is very easy to setup. I assume PHP on it's own would simply access and append a text file or similar held on the host server, which is accessible to me the site owner.

I assume I can test my site locally with a local installation of PHP before I sumit the site to a host server so I can eradicate bugs.

The differences between V8 and V9 are clear with V9 possibly providing better support for user groups. This may be a future consideration. 

The use of X5 for this application would be nice but not essential immediately. As the site develops, having this access woulld be useful. 

It appears in its' native form, X5 just allows a single username password, and multiple users/paswords require PHP to be behind the login page restricted area. Is my understanding correct?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards 

Hello again Michele and Cheeky Man

I misread your post above: you stated it is possible to add multiple users to the site in step 2)of site setup.

Regards

Hello Michele

looking at step 2 and the advanced setup feature, that it is only possible to create a restricted access area with a common username and passord. How is it possible to create a restricted area with different usernames and passwords without using PHP in the tool?

Is this the design intent of the tool?

Thanks in advance.

Regards 

Hello Michele

I have done all you suggest already (X5 is a very intuitive tool) 

in the product documentation I have with V8, it says that only a single username and password can be set up for any access group.

This is in not good for my application, and it seems I have to resort to PHP to control access. having a single username and pasword is not good for site security, as you cannot control access sufficiently.

 As per the thread answers, X5 does not support MySQL, I am therefore left with resorting only to PHP of which my desired application would need some sort of database (or a pseudo database or duplicate the reserved area for each new user, which is not efficient in website design.

Apart from this query, X5 is a very intuitive and powerful website creation tool, and I am very happy with the results to date.

One further question: is there a way of testing the site from within the tool using a standard browser (IE, Opera, Firefox, Safari) rather than the bundled browser, or do I have to publish the file locally to do this? I would be keen to test performance of the site across browsers before publishing.

Many thanks.

Hello Jason,

with v9 you can create more user per group, you can freely install the demo version to test it out if you wish, the download link is http://www.websitex5.com/download

At the moment the preview is only rendered with IE but you can copy the url on the preview and paste it into a different browser for testing purpose.

Hope this  helps

Hello Michele

thank you for your reply.

V9 may be more suitable so I will try this as you suggest.

However, just so I understand correctly. PHP scipts for login page databases usually interact with SQL databases held on the server side. All that is required is a PHP login page on the website that acesses the server side database. There is no facility in V8 to interact back from a server side database to the website generated by X5. Is this correct?

Is this feature going to be supported infuture.

For you answer to browsers, thank you. Is X5 compatible with non standards compliant  browsers such a IE6? The reason I ask is IE6 is still in widespread corporate use, but it gradually being phased out. I should be able to test this in any case using the method suggested above.

 Thank you. 

Hello Michelle

I think I may need to upgrade my site and tool to use MySQL, as you clearly state it is not supported by X5. Nevetheless it does not stop me from uploading my current site, designed using X5. The database integration would have been a nice feature but for the moment I can live without it. I am not advanced in MySQL or PHP to do this myself!

for IE6: yes I know it is very old. The big problem is that some companies that may view my site still sue it, but hopefully they will have caught up with the modern age!

As X5 is CSS compliant I am assuming it will work without problem in Opera and Firefox. The test browser within X5 looks like IE. As you said before, I can test the site by exposrting the file.

I think this closes my current question on PHP/MySQL. What I am interested in is how to use a backdrop on the website, as shown in some of the gallery sites. This looks like a CSS command inserted somewhere. I know you can add CSS at the top of each page but how is the background image added to the page globally?

Thank you very much for your input into my quesions. 

Hello Michelle

as a follow on from the above, I have just tested my website from X5 in Opera (12.02) a Firefox (9.01) using the generated file from test, locatated in C:/Users/Admin/Appdata/local/temp/Websitex5/iwp02/. In both cases, some internal HTML links using the example code as follows

<a href = "#link" > link text </a>

<a name ="link" </a> 

are failing and do not work. Some links are ok. This is not page specific: sometime I have mixture on the ame page of working an non-working internal links. Yet I know all these links are fine in the IE test browser. 

Yet everything works in the internal browser, which looks like IE. I need to use these links to enhance the site and X5 does not provide internal on page links.

Also some  of the font sizes in some of these links are a lot smaller in Opera and Firefox, than in IE.

In all text boxes, the HTML button  is enabled in the text editor.

have your development team seen problems like this before. IE is the target browser as it is corporate so many users will view the site in this, but I would prefer cross browser compliance.

Is this only an anomaly in the test file, and will it show when I export and exhibit the same behaviour in non IE browsers? 

With regards to the above quesion on background, I mean the page border that surrounds the site. When I view the site in Opera and Firefox, it sits centre screen, with blank margins either side. It would be nice to utilise this space with non grey areas.

Thanks in advance.

Hello Jason,

for your first question you can follow this tps&tricks http://answers.websitex5.com/post/26508 , it's for the webfonts but if you take a look at "Using the webfonts in WebSite X5" you learn how to add external files (fonts or images) to all your pages.

Remember that using custom templates you can set a background image for all your pages directly into the editor in step 1.

Related to your last question if you want to have a real test of your site with all the parts working, you need to export it in local  in step 5 and then open the exported project with your browsers. If you use the copy/paste technique it could be that some parts don't work properly, it's better to use it just to see how the page looks in a quick way.

Try to test all the things you reported after having exported your project, it should be ok in all the major browsers.

Hope this helps

Hi Michelle.

I am not doing anything non-standard here: I am trying to use a HTML link in Tahoma font (set by X5 V8 in the text box editor), to point to an on-page link. If I wanted to be more rigourous, I would have done the site in CSS and used h1, h2 etc. As it stands I am using nothing special apart from the text editor facilities in X5 V8, so I would have expected X5 to correctly generate and display ALL fonts and links, and not some.  

It displays it correctly 90% of the time.

As you say, I may need to export the site and then test it, although, I really see no difference at this stage in copying the test file link from my local/temp directory to generating the file for export, unless of course the actual site export uses different methods.

Thanks.

regards

Hello Jason,

as you said if you use the internal text editor it should render in the same way on all browsers, the only thing to take into account, as general rule, is that different browsers could render the same element in different way sometimes, but this isn't directly related with WebSite X5.

If you still think that you are getting a weird behaviour please upload your page somewhere so I can check it out. In this case please give me details about the step you take to reach the result, thank you Jason.

Hello Michelle

I found the link font size problem: this was a coding error, so my apologies for that

However. I exported the site to another directory using the X5 V8 export tools and also created a single directory with all files and images using the final option in the tool.

I tried the exporrted site in IE9, Opera 12.02 and Firefox 9.01. In all cases the behaviour is slightly different:

In all browsers the text, page size, layout is fine. However in Opera and Firefox I am having problems with internal <a href...> </a> links: some do not work when clicked, yet they do in IE9. The majority do, but some don't. This again may be a code error but I am unsure as to why it works in one browser and not others, consistently.

In all broswers with exported site, for some reason, I have lost links to some embedded photos in the site, getting an "error file open error". I had the same problem sometimes during test with the internal browser, where the photo/picture links were lost. I had to reimport the files (sometimes repeatedly). For reference I saved the exporte site in the same drive location as the .iwp project file so the drive is accesible.

 This is a very annoying problem as I am having to go back and reimport the files, only to find that they are lost on export  by the tool, and also I have just tested the site again from within the tool, and it has lost the file links again. 

Have you had problems such as this before?

Thanks in advance.

Hello Jason,

actually it's the first time i hear of repeated issues on cutted link.

I guess, like you said, it may be a coding error, in this case the editor understand that there's some tags not correctly formed and it strips them away.

The fact that only IE9 works on some links it could depend also on the code, Internet Explorer may "guess" better than other browsers if that particular (not well formatted) tag is a link.

I can only suggest you to verify on your code that the links are well formatted, I guess also the image issue can have the same origin.

Hope this helps, thank you

Hello Michelle

thanks for the reponse.

the links are a relatively easy issue to solve now (I hope): most of the links work apart from 5 and this may be just a matter of reformatting or checking the link syntax. All the links created by the tool work, it is just the 5 of the manual ones coded using HTML. They are ineffective links: you just click them and nothing happens in IE9. As you say this may be how IE9 deals with links, and suggests a syntax problem, but the constructs are the same as other hand coded links.

The major problem is the loss of the images imported into the site creation stage using Website X5.  

This is showing up in both the creation of the site within the tool and also the export stage, and it is random in the tool. I can open and test the site many times and all the images are there, but then it loses the image links to the same path that the project is located on. For reference, both the .iwp project and images are in the same folder structure on the same drive.

It seems there is a mechanism in the tool where links are lost to file locations that hve been previously imported. The file and locations have not been modified and remain static.

The full error message is:

Error Loading File. File Open Error: (-2147224850) 

I am running 8.0.16 on Windows 7.

I have seen a similar thread on the help, but it was in German and the single answer was not very helpful, then the thread was never updated. Please ask your software team. If I regenerate the site I am looking for repeatable results.

My system remain unchanged in terms of OS, software, drive and file structure.  

Thank you.

Hello Jason,

I spoke with our developers and this is a strange behaviour, how do you insert the image inside the software? What object are you using? could you provide me with a step by step procedure? 

Thank you

Hello Michele

I use the image object provided in the Create pages step: the camera icon on the right hand side of the page construct.

So I am using X5 V8 8.0.16 on Windows 7 and both the .iwp project file and the images are in the same directory structure on an external HDD connected via USB to my laptop which Windows can read from and write to.

When I  open the Image onbject, using the "..." box to the right of the file path box, I navigate to the correct pciture and click "open". If I edit the picture using the built in tools or want to save the file as a .PNG, I click "save as" and save it to the same location.

I am doing exactly as the tool was designed. 

I agree with the software team. This is strange behaviour. As I stated above it has happned:

- whilst editing the .iwp file and testing it with the internal browser

- after exporting all files to a single folder

I hope this explanation is sufficient.

Thank you

Hello Jason,

sorry for my belated reply, I tested it myself with no issue, could you please try without the external drive? maybe it's just an issue related to how Windows manage that specific external drive. If you try getting the media from your local drive it should works.

Hope this helps

Hello Michelle

thank you for your reply.

this was my next point of attack: copy the project and all associated files to the local hard drive. However, the issue has not manifested itself lately.

Perhaps it is a temporary Windows problem with the HDD.

Nevertheless I will retest it with the site and files on C:\ and let you know how it works.

Thank you

Hello Michelle

I exported the site and all seems to be ok. I am not getting the ame effects either on C:\ drive or the external HDD, and all pictures seem to remain.

I cannot explain this: perhaps it was something with my system.

I think we can close this off now: the site generation seems to remain stable.

One issue though that remains is, the tool does not regenerate the site map after a changed page name, so he old page name remains in the embedded page name on the page and in the site map itself. I have tried turning off site map generation, saving the site, testing it, and then turning site map generation back on, but it does not alter the page name.

Any ideas? 

Thanks in advance.