Event Terms — Controlling Calendar Output

Many users find the EVENT TERM field in the calendar content node to be one of the most confusing parts of the USF calendar system.

You can find the event term field in the form right after Category and Target Audience check box areas. The input for terms is quite different from those two areas in both form and behavior. It’s an open text field where you type a phrase and as you begin to type, terms that are already in the system will appear as hints below the input field.

Because the event term field is set up this way, many users have it in their minds that terms in our Drupal CMS are like tags they are familiar with from social media or blogs like this one. But except for the typed input, terms are not like tags at all. Read More

Why Isn’t My Event Showing Up in Drupal?

OK, so you’ve picked the time and date for your event and gone into the EMS Room Reservation system and booked a space. After a little bit of time you get an email from Events Management confirming the details of your reservation and you know that you are all set for the big event you are planning. So you log into Drupal to add categories and details to the calendar listing so it will show up on the event can feed to your website and appears on the university calendar just like you learned in your training.

But when you go into Drupal and search for your event you can’t find it. There doesn’t seem to be anything in the calendar for you to work on.

What’s going on, Webservices? Read More

Troubleshooting: Why are my headings, text and/or font acting weird?

You are about to hit “Publish” on a post when you find that the heading, font, and text styles are completely different from our Web Content styles.

Maybe the heading is too big…

or the body text is a different font…

or the links are an unusual color.

If this is occurring, there are most likely in-line style codes that you will need to delete in HTML view.  To figure out whether or not you have in-line coding on your page, switch to HTML view.

This is what in-line style coding looks like.

It defines fonts, sizes, and colors that overrides the standard styles, which is why it appears differently in “Preview”.

To get rid of the unwanted styles, colors, and fonts, delete these and any other similar codes.  Make sure to remove both the <opening> and </closing> tags, to avoid getting an error message.  Hit “Save”, “Preview”, then “Publish”.

Hyphens in URLs

So you want to create a URL without hyphens? Not so fast. Hyphenated URLs are easier for users to read, tend to be clicked more often in search results, and prevent unwanted words from forming. Additionally, Google considers hyphens to be word separators, splitting potential keywords in your URL structure. Their advice?

“Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.”

While Bing and other search engines accommodate the use of underscores as word separators, Google does not … yet. So, for the time being, hyphens are your best bet.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k&w=560&h=315]