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CityDesk 2.0-Documentation
What's New in CityDesk 2.0?CityDesk 2.0 makes it easier than ever to build and manage professional quality websites. With new xhtml support, a built-in picture editor, complete support for international sites in any Unicode language, new CityScript features, automatic backups, and hundreds of small improvements and fixes, this is the best version yet!
There have been some changes to the file format. When you first open a 1.0 file with CityDesk 2.0, it will be upgraded automatically. CityDesk will always make a backup of the 1.0 version in case anything goes wrong. After you upgrade the site, you will no longer be able to open it with CityDesk 1.0.
This page lists features that were added or improved in this major new release of CityDesk.
General
The built in picture editor contains all the features you'll need to prepare digital pictures for use on the web. It allows you to rotate, scale, crop, and adjust colors of JPG and PNG images. You can even paste a picture into the main window from the Windows clipboard, so adding pictures to your site is easier than ever and requires no external programs.
New Backup feature makes automatic, rotating backups of your site to a folder you designate. Automatically create backups and keep up to 99 old backups, so you can always recover from a mistake or data loss. We recommend making backups on a different hard drive or on a network hard drive for security.
HTML editing mode includes automatic syntax coloring, making it easier than ever to edit source code.
- The WYSIWYG (normal view) editor now generates valid, standards-compliant xhtml so your website looks great in all the latest browsers. The editor also preserves your whitespace and indenting as much as possible, so your careful HTML layout is not damaged by going into Normal View.
- A new command line option can be used to publish a site, so you can create automatic scheduled jobs to publish a site or publish a site as a part of another process.
- You can now run a command line automatically after publishing your site, before and/or after copying the files up to a server. This can be used to run scripts and external programs which do post-processing on your files. It also makes it easy to use any external program to upload your files to the web site if the built-in file copy or FTP does not work with your web server.
- Reinserting a file that already exists in CityDesk now lets you overwrite the existing file, so you don't have to recreate the links.
You can customize templates to use any label you want for the extra fields, which makes it much easier to remember which field is which. For example, if a given template uses the Extra 1 field for the name of the translator, you can change the label on the the extras tab. Choose Properties for any template to change the labels.
- You can also remove any field from the Extras tab that you're not using, on a per-template basis, giving you more space to edit the remaining tabs, and making it easier to remember which fields have to be filled in for a given template.
- The Headline and Author fields of an article can now include formatting, so you can do things like make each author be a hyperlink to a page about that author.
- The nine most recent sites are listed in File menu making it easier to switch between frequently used sites.
- The variable editing window is easier to use and can be resized.
- A new Insert Variable menu item lists available variables alphabetically and inserts them for you.
- A new Remove Formatting menu item removes all HTML formatting from the selection except for paragraph marks, so it's easier than ever to import text from other word processors and strip off any strange formatting commands they included.
- A new File » Properties window shows full path of current site, how many files it contains, and the size.
- If the file copy stage of publishing begins while you are working in another window, the CityDesk publish window doesn't pop up.
Insert Picture allows you to link to any URL and sports an improved UI.
- New modern look, and support for Windows XP visual styles.
Support for International Sites
The Joel on Software website, created exclusively with CityDesk, is available in over 26 languages, including right to left languages like Hebrew and a variety of Asian languages.CityDesk is now completely Unicode capable, which allows you to create and publish sites in any language or script which is supported by your computer. This works best on Windows 2000 or XP which support Unicode natively.
CityScript
- CityScript now has the ability to link automatically to next and previous articles in a sequence, using nextLink and previousLink. Use this to make navigation easier among a group of related articles.
- A variety of cool new forEach features can be used to create alternating styles (for example, if you want zebra colors in your list). You can also insert something between each iteration of the loop, without having it appear at the end, for example, a|b|c. And you can control precisely what happens if the loop happens to be empty, providing alternate text when there are no articles which match the forEach condition.
- A new {$ include $} statement inserts the body of a single article anywhere. This makes it easy to use articles like variables. In fact if the article uses a template which happens to be blank, no file will be published for that article.
- You can now create a forEach condition which includes all the articles inside a folder and any of its subfolders by adding /* to the end of the folder name, for example,
{$ forEach x in (folder "name/*") $}. See Determining Which Articles To Include. You can use this to further organize a folder internally without affecting the forEach loop.- setDateTimeFormat can automatically use short and long date formats and can automatically pick up the site's language.
- A new {$ withAbsoluteLinks $} statement forces all internal CityDesk links on a page to use an absolute URL instead of a relative URL. This is useful when you want to email a page of a site or creating RSS feeds, so that every URL and picture in the page contains a complete reference and the page is relocatable.
- A new thisFolder condition in forEach loops returns all articles in the same folder as the article being produced. thisArticle returns this article, itself. For example, you can use (not thisArticle) to eliminate the current article from a list of links.
- The (filename "foo")condition in forEach loops now accepts a complete path, e.g. (filename "/News/International/foo")
- Added a new .modifiedDate field added (it is also visible in the article editor) which shows you when a given article was last saved.
- For consistency, the keyword keyword_contains has been changed to keywordContains. (This had been the only keyword in CityDesk with an underscore in the middle.) If you already have scripts that say keyword_contains, don't worry, that still works too.
- New keywords:
{$ publishDate $} and{$ today $} can be used to print the publish date and today's date, respectively.- Two new forEach conditions monthOf and yearOf can be used to return all articles published in a certain month or year.
Bug Fixes
- We've eliminated spurious 's that were inserted by the editor when you inserted two spaces and then deleted one of them.
- Support for multiple monitor systems
- When you use the Windows Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut to rotate between CityDesk and other applications, you can now flip back and forth between an article window and another application without the CityDesk main window getting in the way.
- Paste Without Formatting no longer loses paragraph breaks.
- Replaced comment in first line of published files with <meta> tags.
- Better detection and warning of missing DLL problems
- We've fixed literally hundreds of small bugs, crashes, and annoyances. This version is the most solid version of CityDesk ever!
Sometimes You Have To Go Backwards To Go Forwards
- Pictures no longer support captions.
- Windows 95 is no longer supported.
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