In this article, you'll learn methods to solve the most common issues that may arise when using Site Editor. The first part describes issues that may occur for users who are editing the site within the Site Editor interface in the Admin Console. The later sections focus on issues that site administrators may encounter when setting up Site Editor functionality for a site.

Editor issues

In this section you'll find suggestions to resolve issues that occur when using the Site Editor interface to update a site.

Note: If you'd like to review the detailed instructions on how to use Site Editor to update page content, see Using Site Editor to edit site content in a browser.

Attempts to access the Site Editor feature are unsuccessful

This system includes a convention known as permissions, which are applied to the roles that assigned to each user of the Admin Console. If you are not the site's administrator (the person who set up the site originally), it may be that your user account does not currently include the permissions necessary to access this area of the site.

Cloick on SiteEditor once inside Admin Console.

If you do not see this menu item in the Website tab, or if you try to launch Site Editor, but cannot invoke it, it means that your user account does not currently have the necessary permissions to use it.

If you do not have administrative privileges, contact your site's administrator to ask if you can be granted the permissions (understanding that the ability to update the site comes with a great deal of responsibility). You may need to participate in training sessions first, to ensure that you understand how to use the Site Editor interface to update the site.

Unable to edit certain content or apply formatting using the Site Editor page

There are many ways that Site Editor functionality can be configured by web designers. For example, text formatting features, (such as the ability to set text as bold or underlined) may optionally be disabled by site administrators as they prepare the web pages for publication. These types of restrictions are usually applied to help maintain site consistency across all pages--to ensure that the site displays a similar look and follows a standard design aesthetic as visitor navigate between pages.

It is also possible for web professionals to disable specific portions of each page to prevent them from being edited. The area may contain complex code or features that may be accidentally broken if they are edited. Other times, the area may contain sensitive material that a department has approved (such as legal notices, and End User License Agreements, among others) that should not be changed.

If you are able to log into the Site Editor area through the Admin Console, but cannot update certain content or access specific formatting options, it is likely that you are simply encountering areas of the site (or features within the interface), which have been made unavailable. If you feel you should be able to access specific formatting features or edit a particular area of the page that is not currently editable, contact your site's administrator to see if the page configuration can be updated to enable the content or features. Alternatively, ask the site's administrator to update the content for you.

Difficulties navigating to the page you want to edit

Normally, browsing through the pages in the site while in the Site Editor interface is fairly straightforward. When you log into the Site Editor interface and begin the editing session, you are presented with the site's home page. If you want to edit a different page of the site, you can navigate through the site to edit linked pages. For example, the navigation menu items respond the same way as they do on the live site, so you can click them to quickly locate the page you want to edit.

You can also access any linked page in the site. Hover your cursor over a link. When the Follow Link box appears, click it to visit that page and begin editing it.

If a page is not linked to any other page in the site (an orphan page) you can access it by editing the URL in the browser's address bar, replacing the text after the equal sign (=) with the file name of the page.

For example, edit the highlighted text in the URL below:

http://my-site.worldsecuresystems.com/Admin/Editing.aspx#page=%2Findex.html

with the orphaned page's name:

http://my-site.worldsecuresystems.com/Admin/Editing.aspx#page=promotion.html

Site administrator issues

In this section you'll find suggestions to resolve issues that occur when configuring the site to customize the editability of specific page regions and control how the Site Editor interface works:

Issues when inserting editable regions in templates (DWT files)

You can edit template files in Dreamweaver to add editable regions using the same syntax used for web pages. For example, you can add the Site Editor attribute: ice:editable="*" to the same types of tags (<div>, <td> and <th>, the parent containers). You can also specify which formatting options will be enabled when users access Site Editor through the Admin Console.

See Understanding the default editable regions within Site Editor for more details.

However, the workflow for updating Dreamweaver templates to use Site Editor differs slightly from updating web pages. Consider the following when editing DWT files for use with the browser-based Site Editor interface:

When you create a new template file (File > New > Blank Template > HTML) you'll notice that the option to Enable Site Editor cannot be checked, because the option is grayed out.

This occurs because there's a specific order of operations that must be followed:

1. Create a new DWT file (Choose File > New > Blank Template > HTML, choose a CSS layout and click Create) .
2. Insert one BC editable region (Choose Insert > Template Objects > BC Editable Region).
3. Save the DWT file. (It is automatically saved in the Templates folder at the root level of your site; do not move it from this folder).
4. Insert the Site Editor editable region (by selecting a <div>, <td> or <th> container that exists inside the BC editable region and choosing Insert > Site Editor > Editable Region).
5. Edit the template as desired, and then save the DWT file.

If you attempt to insert a Site Editor editable region outside the BC editable region of the template (or you've not yet defined the BC editable region for the template), an error message is displayed.

Click OK to close the alert dialog box.

To avoid this error in the future, be sure to first insert the template's editable region and save the DWT file before inserting the Site Editor editable region on a template page.

Restricting editing capabilities on specific pages

Generally speaking, you do not need to edit the HTML pages in a site to turn on Site Editor. It is enabled by default for <div>, <td> and <th> containers. If the user has the necessary permissions, they can log into their site and edit the content that they have the ability to access.

For example, you may set the user's role to enable the editing of web pages, but not template files. Without making any changes to the page or template code, users will not be able to edit template content--although if you log into the Site Editor interface with full permissions, you'll be able to edit both pages and templates. Since templates comprise so much of the displayed content in a site, and a single change could affect an entire site's appearance, it is recommended to not grant permissions to edit templates to users.

However, you may encounter situations where you want users to edit most of the web pages in a site, except for a few. In these cases, it is important to understand how to set specific pages as uneditable.

Site Editor follows these rules:

• If the page contains <div>, <td> or <th> tag containers, these areas are marked as editable by default.
• However, if you specifically set at least one of these containers as an Site Editor editable region, then all other <div> tag containers on the page are set as uneditable automatically.

So, while it may seem counterintuitive, the way to make a page non-editable in Site Editor is to define a single editable region on that page. For example, you could create a <div> tag in the footer, or some other inconspicuous area that does not contain any text or image content, and then set that section as editable (using Dreamweaver or by hand-coding the tag). Ensure that at least one opening <div> tag has the following syntax:

<div ice:editable="*">

If you want to restrict the formatting abilities even further, use this syntax for the opening <div> tag:

<div ice:editable="bold">

Publish the page, and log into the Site Editor interface. Navigate to the page and test the editing accessiblity to confirm that the desired content is no longer editable.

Repeat this step for any pages that you want to specifically control the content, to maintain exclusive ownership of the page and protect sensitive content from changing. You may also want to let users know that you've disabled the editability of these areas, so that they understand why they are not able to update the content when they use Site Editor.

Limiting access to upload image files

When a user logs into the Site Editor interface and uses the image feature to upload a new image file (choosing the Media Location: My Computer setting), the file uploads and inserts as expected, but the image file is saved in the root level of the site hierarchy, which is not optimal.

At the moment, there's currently no way to preset where the uploaded image files will go if the user uploads a file from their computer. Additionally, the Site Editor interface doesn't include the ability to choose the destination folder during the upload process.

Note: If you later log into the Admin Console and use the File Manager to move the image files from the root level to a subfolder in the site, the paths to the image files will break, unless you manually re-insert the images.

Alternatively, you can use Dreamweaver to get (download) the page and its dependent files, move the image files to the desired location in the site heirarchy, click Update to update the links in the Update Files dialog box that appears, and then republish the page and dependent files.

For this reason, it is a best practice to disable the image upload feature for users, because the image files uploaded with the My Computer option are placed at the root level of the site by default.

Or if desired, you can optimize and upload the image files in advance, and instruct users to choose the My Site option and navigate to select the existing image files that they can insert from within the images folder.

If you've previously uploaded the images for the content updates, instruct users to choose Media Location: My Site and then use the interface to browse and locate the file they want to insert on the page.