InContext Editing
From Adobe Labs
Adobe InContext Editing allows web professionals to create editable pages in minutes, simplifying and streamlining site updating and management. Adobe InContext Editing also allows site content managers to easily extend editing privileges to non-technical authors and clients. Now, all of a site's contributors can make content changes on demand without compromising site design.
Features
Easily create editable regions in minutes
Easily define editable regions of new or existing Dreamweaver web pages. Create repeating regions that allow content editors and contributors to manage repeating content such as table rows or news items. Content contributors can add, delete, or change the order of repeating items.
Control flexible, full-featured design options
Control which portions of a page your contributors can edit. Develop web pages with highly specific editable regions, from a single headline to an entire page's copy. Control whether users can insert images and whether they can access those images from their own computers or from a common directory on the published site.
Quickly extend site publishing rights
Easily set editor and publisher permissions for content contributors. Editors can create drafts of website material while publishers can both create and publish content.
Simplify website editing
Give your clients an easy way to update web pages with little or no training. The InContext Editing online service works like most WYSIWYG word-processing applications, delivering immediate results for most content contributors.
No software required
Eliminate software installation and maintenance hassles for clients and team members. The InContext Editing service is available from most web browsers. Users simply sign in to the service to get started.
For complete list of new features and functionality visit the Adobe InContext Editing homepage.
FAQs
1. What is InContext Editing?
Adobe InContext Editing is an online service that allows designers to create, manage, and control editable web pages. With InContext Editing, web designers can allow content editors, publishers and even non-technical contributors to update website content through their browsers—without learning HTML, installing software, or compromising design integrity.
2. Who should use InContext Editing?
Professional web designers, web developers, and website administrators should use InContext Editing to give clients and non technical team members the ability to update website content without having to learn HTML.
3. Does InContext Editing work with Dreamweaver?
Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software supports InContext Editing. For more details, visit the Dreamweaver integration page. Dreamweaver CS3 and earlier versions do not support InContext Editing.
4. When will InContext Editing be available?
A free preview of InContext Editing will be available for users in the United States in October 2008.
5. How much does InContext Editing cost?
During the free preview, InContext Editing is available at no charge.
6. What are the goals of the Free Preview?
Adobe offers the InContext Editing free preview to give the web professional community an opportunity to provide feedback, help identify bugs, or suggest feature additions before launch of the paid subscription service.
See answers to more frequently asked questions on the Adobe InContext Editing FAQ page.
Release Notes
System Requirements
Client workstation
- Mac OS
- Mac OS X v10.4 or 10.5 operating system
- PowerPC® G5 or multicore Intel® processor
- 256MB RAM memory
- SVGA 1,024x768 display
- Safari 3.1(or higher) or Firefox 3.0.5 (or higher) browsers
- 512Kbps or faster Internet connection required to access the service
- Browser SSL support must be enabled
- Adobe Flash Player 10.0.22.87 or later with Local Storage option enabled
- Browser JavaScript support must be enabled
- Windows
- Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (certified for 32-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista) operating system
- 1GHz or faster Intel® or AMD processor
- 256MB RAM memory
- SVGA 1,024x768 display
- Internet Explorer 6.x, 7.x, or Firefox 3.0.8 (or higher) browser
- 512Kbps or faster Internet connection required to access the service
- Browser SSL support must be enabled
- Adobe Flash Player 10.0.22.87 or later with Local Storage option enabled
- Browser JavaScript support must be enabled
Web server
- Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 4 or 5, Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Enterprise Edition, Windows Server® 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, or FreeBSD 5.5 operating system
- FTP access support for FTP or SFTP is required for the InContext Editing service to push files on the customer web server;
- FTP server IIS 6, IIS 7, vsftpd 2.0.x, ProFTPD 1.3.x, or Pure-FTPd
- Web server hosting the site HTML files must have a public IP address; NAT protocol is not supported
- When active, firewall software must allow an FTP communication between the InContext Editing server and the customer web server
New features on April 2009 release
- Create editable regions directly in your browser: Define editable regions in your website directly from your web browser. This functionality gives you an even faster method for creating editable pages that is accessible from virtually anywhere.
- Note: The functionality is available on pages that do not contain any editable regions and is triggered by the service before entering in Edit mode. More information on this feature on in the InContext Editing Administrator Help
- Simplified administration controls: Registering a site has never been simpler. The new multi-step user interface allows you to register your site with InContext Editing service faster and easier by requesting the information at the right moment and providing browsing capabilities for selecting folders. Updating connection information is also made easier though an updated user interface.
- Updated permissions matrix: Publishers have more control over who is editing the site content. They’re now able to invite or remove users and they can do that directly for the InContext Editing client.
- Updated editing user interface: Styles menu has been moved to main toolbar while color palettes have been moved to "Advanced" menu.
Issues fixed on April 2009 release
- The InContext Editing servers were not specifying an user-Agent when making HTTP requests to client server. Some servers were denying the connection because of this. Now, InContext Editing uses its own User-Agent.
- InContext Editing now works even if the SIZE FTP command is not enabled or not functioning properly. (fixed internal bug # 246081)
- You can now duplicate .shtml pages using the Duplicate Page button.
- A JavaScript error was thrown when applying a CSS class on an image inserted in the Editable region, when using Internet Explorer. No error should be thrown now.
- In some cases, the Login dialog was displayed under a Flash video. Now, the Login dialog is displayed on top of all Flash videos.
- IFrame tags are no longer allowed inside an editable region. You cannot enter edit mode if the editable regions contain iframe tags.
- InContext Editing now works even if HEAD HTTP request is disabled, or a custom error page is in place. Update the site settings for already registered sites, especially those where the HEAD issue was previously identified or on sites where there are 404 custom error pages. (fixed internal bug #245905)
- If you are using Firefox 3 and Flash 9, the toolbar button tooltips are not displayed. The problem has become obsolete with this update because the service has been updating to Flash Player 10.
- Changed few keyboard shortcuts for some actions in edit mode:
- CTRL+UP - focus the previous Editable Region, was CTRL+SHIFT+TAB
- CTRL+DOWN - focus the next Editable Regions, was CTRL+TAB
- Fixed the restriction that forced users to escape the space character in a site name when when registering a website to the InContext Editing service from Administrator Panel. (fixed internal bug #2128928)
Known issues and limitations
Web server and site configuration
- The www prefix is ignored by the InContext Editing Editing service. This means that the "http://www.mysite.com/" is interpreted as being the same as "http://mysite.com/"
- If your FTP server for some reason responds in more than 60 seconds to a FTP operation request, you may get this message on attempting to start an Edit/Save/Discard/Publish operation: "A problem occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Solution: Please check your Internet connection and try again."
- In this case your connection to the server may work, but the problem may be related to the FTP response time mentioned above. InContext Editing does not handle this situation. (internal bug #2128593)
- InContext Editing service doesn’t take into consideration the communication protocol when defining a site. Ex: http://www.mysite.com/ is considered to be identical to https://www.mysite.com/; In this case, InContext Editing will prevent users from registering these URL’s as separate web sites.
- Websites working exclusively on HTTPS are not supported.
- The “includes/ice/” folder generated by Dreamweaver must be located at the root of the registered site.
- InContext Editing operations which require an FTP connection might be limited by the number of simultaneously FTP connections allowed by your web hosting provider. The list of operations requiring FTP connections includes: Save, Publish, Discard, Upload file, Insert Media, Browsing through folder structure using the Asset Manager. (internal bug # 245987)
Browsers
- Non-US keyboards are not supported (They are handled as US Keyboards layouts. Ex: Alt Gr + Q will not generate @ on a German keyboard). (internal bug #242321)
- Mouse pointer flickers when hovering menus in Firefox (internal bug #240940 )
- While in Edit mode in Safari 3 browser (MAC) with unsaved changes, reloading the page or navigating with Back in browser may cause this message to appears for a moment: " The operation could not be performed because a problem occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Please check your Internet connection and try again." You should ignore the message and continue your work. (internal bug #2130350)
Pages
- InContext Editing supports only the following page encodings: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8
- InContext Editing can only edit pages with valid HTML mark-up with any of the following doctypes:
- "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
- "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
- "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
- "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
- "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
- Pages named “pagename_draft.ext” will be considered as being the draft version of the “pagename.ext”.
- InContext Editing can edit only static content from inside dynamic pages. If dynamic content exists inside an editable region (or repeating group), it will be lost.
- InContext Editing does not support editing pages containing Server Side Includes with editable content. The content included using Server Side Includes should not contain editable regions.
- InContext Editing does not support dynamic generated editable regions (regions generated via JavaScript, server-side code, etc.).
- While using InContext Editing service to edit web pages, Flash objects inside the page may be temporarily disabled on Firefox 3 for Windows and Internet Explorer 6 and 7. (internal bug #2130238)
- InContext Editing does not support editing pages with framesets.
- InContext Editing does not support editing the content placed inside an IFRAME tag. The content inside an IFRAME is ignored while editing a page.
- InContext Editing service does not support editing pages containing mixed InContext Editing markup (attribute based and unobtrusive).
- InContext Editing displays an error message saying that the doctype is not supported when trying to edit using Internet Explorer a page who's doctype is not the first thing in the page (internal bug #2128637). Internet Explorer ignores the DOCTYPE declaration if it's not the first thing in the page.
Editing
- HTTP authentication is no longer supported by InContext Editing (Password protected websites folders and pages cannot be edited using InContext Editing);
- InContext Editing may not work with JavaScript frameworks that alter the page while in Edit Mode (specifically: elements' innerHTML, dimensions, positioning, z-index, display, visibility).
- InContext Editing does not support the sIFR library if the elements to be replaced are located inside editable or repeating region groups. An error message is displayed when trying to edit a page and page editing is blocked. (internal bug #246000)
- InContext Editing does not support editable or repeating region groups inside Spry Dynamic Regions.
- Maximum file size allowed by the InContext Editing service is limited to 2 MB. (you cannot edit or upload files bigger than 2 MB)
- The InContext Editing service cannot define language attribute (LANG).
- The InContext Editing service supports English only file names/character sets.
- InContext Editing does not support the following characters in file and folder names: “,”, “;”, “:”, “?”, “/”
- On Safari 3, InContext Editing does not support to:
- Register web sites addresses (URLs) containing spaces or other special characters that need to be encoded (Ex: space - %20, # -%23, etc.) (internal bug #245892)
- URLs containing hash (#) character in the file or folder names (internal bug #245269)
- There are server configurations where we cannot extract the file timestamps (in Asset Manager the last modified date will not be displayed or be corrupted).
- The InContext Editing Asset Manager does not support folder names starting with space(s)
- Adobe InContext Editing is not compatible with Adobe AIR.
- When entering in Edit mode, page layout might be changed depending on the page structure and CSS style.
- If using unobtrusive markup, the same CSS class must not be used simultaneously for InContext Editing regions structuring and for styling content placed inside InContext Editing regions. (internal bug #245944)
- InContext Editing does not support editing regions which contain any of the following tags: embed, object, iframe or script. The workaround is to move these outside the editable regions
- Adobe InContext Editing doesn't support files and folders in website structure starting with ' ' (space) character or containing '\' (backslash) character.
- Changes made to a page using InContext Editing service may be lost if the site developer re-uploads the files stored on his local machine on the live server. This is possible since the site developer may have an outdated version of the file(s). To workaround this situation, each web developer must first get the latest version of the file then change it locally. This is not bullet-proof however, since somebody can still make changes on the live page, after it was downloaded locally. (internal bug #2017819)
- Adobe InContext Editing may malfunction if used browser's zooming level is different than default (zero)(internal bug #2128645)
- It seems that when Firebug is installed, it will prevent Firefox from reloading or checking if some pages have been modified. This will cause users that have it installed not to see the latest deployed version unless they clear their cache. Users not having Firebug installed should not be affected by this. (internal id #2275780)
- If the content (or part of the content) of an InContext Editing region is set from CSS to be displayed floated, overflowed or at an absolute position, the border decorations around that region may be displayed at a wrong position or may have invalid dimensions. This means that part of the editable content will get displayed out of region's context. The problem may also occur for an image which is left/right aligned.
- Link URLs that contain characters like "=" and "&" are not opened correctly on simple click, while logged to InContext Editing View mode (those chars will be altered). The links will open as expected in new browser tab or outside InContext Editing view. (internal bug #2311746)
Admin Panel
- The News panel doesn't support keyboard navigation.
Additional Resources
- Dreamweaver CS4 – Visit the Dreamweaver CS4 homepage.
- InContext Editing - Visit the InContext Editing homepage
