EPiServer Module 3.3.0.38 Released
EPiServer Module 3.3.0.38 has now been released.
This release fixes an issue where unpublished pages when deleted from within EPiServer were not also being removed from the Topic Map. This would cause an already deleted unpublished page to show as a valid association within the Topic Map Editor interface. If you have previously encountered this issue, you must manually remove the topic for the deleted unpublished page as the consistency checker is unable to determine topics that do not have an associated page within EPiServer at this time.
Compatibility with EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP2 RC has also been tested. We are aware of cosmetic issues with the Topic Map Editor when using Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox however.
EasySearch Video on EpiLabs and YouTube
Our EPiServer search engine has made it onto YouTube thanks to a great blog post by Stein-Viggo Grenersen of BVNetwork on EPiLabs. The video shows how to use EasySearch with episerver categories (or topic maps classification) to provide high performance faceted filtering of full text search results.
EPiServer Module 3.3.0.37 Released
EPiServer Module 3.3.0.37 has now been released. This update addresses an issue whereby registering events with SchemaJSON were not being fired correctly. Registering events with SchemaJSON now requires that after the event is registered FlushSchema() is called so that the event is properly registered.
EPiServer Module 3.3.0.36 Released
EPiServer Module 3.3.0.36 has now been released.
- The topic map interface has been improved when dealing with topics scoped in multiple languages as well as for topics that are unscoped. Editors can now choose the language of topics they wish to see, either in a scoped language or all topics in their default unscoped view.
- Compatibility with Firefox has also been improved there may still be minor cosmetic issues however.
The upgrade requires that you install the EPiServer Module SQL extensions by running the included SQL script.
Networked Planet wins “Module of the Year” prize for EasySearch
Oslo 12/11/08, at the EPiServer Techforum NetworkedPlanet were awarded the Module of the Year prize on EPiCode for EasySearch.
EasySearch is a powerful, simple to configure, search engine for the EPiServer content management system. It supports full text indexing of pages and files based on EPiserver events. Further, it provides facilities to developers to refine the indexes that are created to provide the best possible search experience for the customer.
The EasySearch module comes complete with a generic search and indexing API for developers, completely customizable indexing, an administrator plug-in for managing the index and several ASP.NET 2.0 web parts for building search pages and search driven web sites in seconds.
EasySearch is also gaining enterprise search level features with support for load balanced and federated searching.
NetworkedPlanet technical lead on EasySearch, Andy Brodie, had this to say about EasySearch:
"There was a clear need in the EPiServer community for a robust, easily configurable and developer friendly search engine. With EasySearch we’ve done all the under the hood event processing and exposed a set of interfaces and hooks that really empower developers to quickly build great search solutions."
Graham Moore Director of NetworkedPlanet added "Having the EPiCode platform was an ideal way for us to take EasySearch to market. We have had great support from BVNetwork and the EPiServer developer community in building this module."
Steve Celius of BVNetwork said on the day "NetworkedPlanet follows best practices when developing the search module for EPiServer CMS, giving full insight into each step of the development by committing often and providing good comments. They respond to tickets in a timely manner and make new releases available often. The source is of high quality and contains some of the most advanced event handling and page life cycle tracking available on the EPiServer platform."
For more information, please download a technical overview of EasySearch.
EPiServer 5 CMS Web Services “not allowed”
Some of our customers have reported problems with the EPiServer Module 3.1 BETA for EPiServer 5 CMS. Namely whenever the TMCoreEPiDataService.asmx web service is invoked the following error is produced:
2008-01-11 14:25:51,959 ERROR [18] EPiServer.Global.Global_Error - 1.2.5 Unhandled exception in ASP.NET
System.Web.HttpException: The HTTP verb POST used to access path '/NetworkedPlanet/EPiServerModule/Service/TMCoreEPiDataService.asmx/GetTopicNameAndType' is not allowed.
at System.Web.DefaultHttpHandler.BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback callback, Object state)
at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()
at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)
This error is caused by a bug in EPiServer that will be fixed in EPiServer CMS 5 SP1.
EPiServer's explanation of the problem and 2 workarounds are posted here: http://www.episerver.com/en/EPiServer_Knowledge_Center/FAQ_EPiServer_4/956/Invoking-WebService-operations-in-IIS5-causes-an-HttpException/
This problem does not affect users deploying EPiServer solutions in a local ASP.NET development server.
Technical information about the TMCore EPiServer Module 3.0 Alpha
Installation and Configuration
We have only tested this against the EPiServer CMS RC3 release. We suspect and hope it will work with subsequent RCs and we'll keep this blog up to date regarding compatability as new releases come out.
The existing documentation for installation and usage remains the same, therefore following the installation instructions provided is the correct procedure with the following addition. There is one new configuration property called:
<add key="NP_TM_NPCL_Endpoint" value="http://localhost/npcl-ws/NPCLSchemaService.asmx" />
This does have a default value (shown above) but in case your NPCL web service is somewhere else this is the additional line to add to the appsettings section in web.config.
Known Issues
If the Topic Map tab contents cannot render within the window and a scrollbar is required in Internet Explorer 7, then scrolling results in some weird behaviour in regards to the CSS. You can see updates on this issue on the EPiServer Developer Forum.
Migration from TMCore EPiServer Module 2.x
We haven't done a rigorous test of this, but none of the topic map data structures have been changed and as we have used our own GUID property on EPiServer pages in the 2.0 module pulling across the EPiServer data and the topic map we do not expect any compatibility issues of this type.
Http Post not allowed by default when deploying TMCore and EPiServer Solutions
When deploying production versions of TMCore EPiServer Module it is often the case that the editorial application works from the local browser but not a remote browser. This is because web applications by default do not allow Http Post operations. This is required by the Topic Map editor that is integrated with EPiServer. To fix this problem ensure the following is contain in the episerver web.config file.
<system.web> <webServices> <protocols> <add name="HttpPost"/> </protocols> </webServices> </system.web>
If using ASP.NET 2.0 you can apply this configuration change to only the path containing the web service by wrapping the above XML in a location element:
<location path="NetworkedPlanet/EPiServerModule/Service"> <system.web> <webServices> <protocols> <add name="HttpPost"/> </protocols> </webServices> </system.web> </location>
TMCore and EPiServer Optimizations
Asbjørn Vølstad is a senior solution architect at Making Waves, and has been working with TMCore and EPiServer on a number of projects. In this post he talks about testing and optimizing, large, dynamic solutions based on TMCore and EPiServer. The specific project he mentions is the new norwegian government portal Regjeringen.no.
TMCore EPiServer Module Update
Thanks to excellent feedback from our partners and our continued QA processes we are pleased to announce the update of the TMCore EPiServer Module to version 2.0.1.0
The following bugs have been fixed
- Publishing a page caused all associations to be published, even if the page at the other end of the association was unpublished. Behaviour is changed to only publish associations where both ends of the association are published pages (or a topic without a page).
- Javascript error reported if calling up topic details for a topic which did not represent an EPiServer page in the EPiServer Edit mode. This has been fixed.
- Copying a page in EPiServer did not cause a new GUID to be assigned or a new topic to be created. This has been fixed.
Please contact Networked Planet to obtain an updated version of the module.
