WCMS Developer Menu (WCMS Part 7)

Our latest installment about the WCMS, (Webcrossing Customization Management Suite), is about the developers tools available.

You first must click the link to "Enable developer mode," which will expose an additional pulldown menu below the Localization Manager menu.


Once you've done that, you will see 4 tools available:

  1. Rebuild Include Files
    The WCMS system does its magic by writing a number of special script files which turn on various plugins in various locations in the forum hierarchy.  These files are called "Include" files because, like a server-side include, they load the right script files in the right place.  If something goes wrong, or you accidentally delete one of those include files, this tool will look through all the locations in the forum hierarchy and delete and recreate all those include files. If you have a large, deep hierarchy, it could take some time and possibly impact performance, but if you have this problem you probably won't mind taking your site down temporarily in order to fix it.

  2. Enable "std" Strings
    Each plugin has its own project name. Some older script files from previous versions may use the now-deprecated "std" project for the localization strings.  If you are using one of those older files as a base for your own customization project, you may need to turn this setting on in order to get the localization strings to load for your project.  You only need to worry about this if your file has localization calls using the "std" project, like:

    lang("std", "somestring")
    %% "lang".jsCall("std", "somestring") %%

  3. Enable String Debugging
    If there is a missing localization string sometimes it can be difficult to figure out which plugin project the string is coming out of.  Enabling this setting will add HTML comments after each string call, telling you which project the string is coming from, which string is being called, the language being returned, and information about the user's language settings. This can be really handy when you need it, but be fore-warned, it makes your submit buttons really ugly because the HTML comment will be displayed as part of the submit value and displayed literally on the page.  So you don't want to do this on a production server.

  4. View Log Files
    Admittedly the best way to view log files is on the server via FTP, but if you just need a quick look and aren't in a position to use FTP, this can provide you with that peek you need.  You can choose to see:
    • the last 50 lines of webx.log (showing server status and errors)
    • webxincludes.log (showing which script files are being loaded)
    • the last 50 lines of the logLangErrors file (showing missing localization strings)
    • the most-recently-written JS error file (showing a stack trace of the last SSJS error)



And that's it! To hide this menu, just use the "Disable developer mode" link just below the Developer Menu.


We've got just one more post on the WCMS - next time on how to set granular host permissions to uses the WCMS tools.

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