How do I ......

The collaboration features of this website are diverse, we understand if you feel a bit lost at first. The following pages try to make you feel comfortable and explain the most common tasks. If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to ask (using the "contact us" form or using our forum).
When you see a page that needs improvement, you're welcome to add a comment to that page.


Create Content

To create content on the OpenEdge Hive, you must decide both what type of content you want to create and to which group or groups you want the content to belong. The various types of content are described here. All Hive content must belong to at least one group and the group should be chosen so that people subscribed to that group will find your content relevant to their interest area. You must be subscribed to a group in order to add content to that group.

To see a list of all current groups and to update your subscriptions, go here. For some more information on where to put content see here.

To create content, either Browse Groups, select the desired group, and a content menu will appear in the right column or if you already have the necessary group memberships, you can use the links below:

General Content
Book Page, one or more pages on a topic arranged sequentially and in a hierarchy. Only the top page should be linked to the Classification for the site map. Great for multi-part content.

Page, a single isolated page about a topic.

User Link, a database of links to external websites and add descriptions to them.

Project Related Content
Project, a database for issues, bug tracking, and feature requests.

Issue, used to attach issues to Projects

Forum Topic, used to add a new forum topic to an existing forum.

Group, add a new Organic Group, which is a group of people who share a common interest and like to collaborate on that. Often but not neccesarily associated with a Project.

Other Content
Blog Entry, useful for general observations or running commentary.

Image are uploaded in order to use them in other pages.

Poll, used to create a public poll.


Creating good "teasers" or previews

When creating most node types there is a section called Description or Body into which one can put a significant amount of text or more complext HTML. When there is a reference to this node following the Browse by Category links, searching, or other forms of site navigation in which multiple targets can be listed on a single page, Drupal will show a "preview" of the node by displaying a paragraph or two from the top of the Body or Description so that one can have a better idea whether or not it is a node one wants to explore. This brings up two important points for creating optimum site content.

One is that one can insert <!--break--> into the Body or Description to tell Drupal where to make the break. This means that the Preview can be one or two complete paragraphs which provide a good introduction instead of being broken at some arbitrary point.

The other is that one generally wants to avoid putting any but very small images in the Preview portion because otherwise they will take up much more space than is "polite". Because Drupal has no ability to thumbnail or split the image, a large image at the top of the Body or Description will mean an extraordinarily large Preview. Not only does this take up much more space than other people are getting for their text-only previews, but it probably also doesn't provide much information about your node since there will be a limited amount of accompanying text. Note too that one is likely to have formatting problems because the Preview is normally displayed in a narrower center column than will be the case for the full Body or Description. So, the general advice is to put any images below the <!--break--> .

When creating your node, there is a preview button at the bottom which will allow you to see both the Preview and Full versions of your node.


Get started with creating new content

Do you remember subscribing to the Sandbox group, when you first registered? If you don't remember, then you can click the navigation tab in the header and find the list of groups. If you visit the Sandbox group, you will see if you are subscribed, or if you need to subscribe.

You must be subscribed to the Sandbox group in order to use it for playing or for tentative "draft" work. We use this group because all nodes require a group "audience". If you are just playing or working on your first draft, you might not want a big audience. :)

The Sandbox is ideal if you want to play with creating different node types before settling on which node types to use for your new Hive content.

When you create a new node, you will see a series of checkboxes for selecting audience, and that is where you will specify Sandbox.

Use this Sandbox group as the audience if you are just playing or if you are not yet ready to publish the nodes you are creating. If you decide to publish your node, you can change it to another group (other than Sandbox), and request that your new node be referenced from some existing node on the Hive.

You can find the nodes you've created by clicking the recent tab in the header.


How to add favorites

There is a lot of content on The Hive, so you may want to add specific pages to your favorites.
You could simply use the "Favorites" option of your web browser, but that has a the downside that your favorites are only stored on a single PC.

An alternative is to store your favorites as bookmarks in The Hive database!
Many pages have a link near the page footer, with a text like "bookmark this". You only have to click that link once to add the current page to your list of bookmarks.

To see your list of bookmarks, click "my bookmarks" in your personal navigation menu (that's the block in the right column on every page).


How to upload a photograph (or image)

A picture can say more than a thousand words. Yet I am going to waste some words: on the subject of how to upload a picture to this website.

I think there are broadly two purposes for images:
- you are writing some text (like a help topic) and want to attach an in-line image to illustrate the text, or
- the image itself is the subject (for example a photograph) and you want to publish it, probably in an image gallery

Whatever the purpose is, the first hurdle you've got to take is uploading the image. Once you have uploaded the image you can reuse it in articles or galleries all over the website.

Preparation:

Before you begin, make sure the picture is not larger than 1024 pixels wide and 1024 pixels heigh. Smaller is fine, but the website will simply refuse to store your image if it does not fit in a square of 1024x1024. If your picture is larger you will have to use a tool like Photoshop to shrink it before you can try to upload the pic to The Hive.

Create an Image node:

When you are logged in you can choose menu-item "Create content | image" in your personal action menu, or menu-item "create image" in one of the group menus.
A form will appear where you can assign a title and a body text (to describe the picture) and of course a file picker to select the image that you want to upload.
In this form you can also choose to select an "Image Gallery", but this is optional. Galleries are nice for events like Progress Exchanges, for example. When you select a gallery, your image will appear as a thumbnail in the gallery at http://www.oehive.org/image and the image node will have Prev/Next links so people can easily browse the gallery. Nice!
Note: you can only pick one of the already existing galleries, there is currently no way for you to create a new gallery. If you want a new gallery, please consult one of the site administrators.
Submit the form when you are pleased with what you have entered. The website will store the image (if not larger than 1024x1024) and will also create a small thumbnail. The image will have its own webpage and people will be able to add comments to it.

Insert an image in a text:

When you are editing a node (like for example a help text) you can insert an image into the text. Just below the editor field is a link "add image", when you click it you will see a popup that shows thumbnails of your image nodes. You can select one and fill in some attributes to have it inserted in your text. It is probably pretty self-explaining but there is one catch: the image size. When you select "size=other" you can enter any size you want, but you probably want the original full size of the image. Unfortunately the popup seems to suggest wrong defaults, so you have to remember the correct dimensions and enter them yourself in the dialog.


Redirect from previous site to the hive

Suppose you already have some Progress-related material on your own website, and decide to move it to The OpenEdge Hive, then you may consider redirecting the old location of that material to the new url.

Redirection prevents you from losing your existing visitors. When you don't redirect you may have the following problems:

  • People may have bookmarked your page. When they visit that bookmark, they just find nothing
  • Many Progress related websites have links to other Progress related websites. I have noticed that links are usually not actively maintained, so when you move a page there will be broken links
  • Your old page may have a good Google rank, but the new page won't (just because it is new)
  • It takes quite some time for Google to find the new page, even if the old page was indexed regularly

You could replace your old HTML page with a new HTML page, that redirects users to the new address. Search engines are not very happy with this method, because they will now have to index both the old page and the new page. The new page will still be seen as a new page, with no rank, and the ranking of the old page may actually decrease.

A better method involves editing the .htaccess file on your webserver to set up redirection (assuming that you have access to this file and have permissions to edit it). When I moved pages from www.global-shared.com to The Hive, I have edited the .htaccess file like this:

## make sure nobody gets the htaccess files
<Files ~ "^[\._]ht">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    Satisfy All
</Files>

RewriteEngine on

# permanent redirecting to oehive.org :

# redirect the old wiki pages:
RewriteRule ^win32/appearance/centerwindow$ http://oehive.org/node/394 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^win32/appearance/closebutton$ http://oehive.org/node/392 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^win32/appearance/flashwindowex$ http://oehive.org/node/395 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^win32/appearance/getdevicecaps$ http://oehive.org/node/396 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^win32/appearance/hidetaskbarbutton$ http://oehive.org/node/397 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^win32/appearance/lockwindowupdate$ http://oehive.org/node/398 [R=301,L]

# redirect RSS feeds:
RewriteRule ^feed.php(.*) http://oehive.org/og/feed/385 [R=301,L]

# redirect the default page ( "http://www/global-shared.com" becomes "http://oehive.org/win32api"
RewriteRule ^$ http://oehive.org/win32api  [L]

This assumes that your (Apache) server is compiled with mod_rewrite and that httpd.conf does not disallow you to use it.

Search engines like this method. The R=301 instruction tells them to drop the old address from their indexes and replace it by the new address, and to assign the ranking of the old page to the new page!! And, because this is known as "permanent redirecting", they don't have to attempt to read the old page again.

The advantages are clear:
- there are no broken links
- the new pages are sooner indexed
- your content keeps their Google rankings


Web Services Deployment

Hi, Some One has an complete example of deploy and consumption od Web Services in Progress


Where to put content?

When adding new content to The Hive, there are always two big questions -- what kind of content and where should the content be added. The first question is discussed here. Having picked the type of node or nodes that you want to add, one needs to know where and how to add it. This depends on the nature of the content.

If you are adding multi-part content such as a series of book pages collected into a manual, a series of book pages containing code samples, a project with associated forum, documentation, etc., then the first important point to keep in mind is that one wants one node and only one node from this set to the the top level node, the home, for the whole set. Only this top level node will be added to the site navigation and the rest of the content will be found from there. The Hive editors reserve the right to add new categories and/or switch categories in a way that we feel will make you material most easily found and most appropriately grouped with other related material.

If you are adding a single page of content, e.g., a description with an attached white paper and it is not a part of any larger body of work, then this becomes a single top level node and is handled just like the top level node for something larger.

If what you are adding is a book page or blog entry, i.e., something which isn't really a whole substantive topic all on its own, then you need to attach it below some top level node. If this is a case of supplementing an existing FAQ, for example, then you would create a book page and use the outline tab to attach it to the appropriate place within the book. If it is something more like a blog entry, then you need to figure out what larger topic it might be part of. Don't be afraid to ask us to create some new categories and top level nodes to serve as an appropriate place to connect your content.

Let us know if you have any questions so that we can try to make the most useful site for everyone.