Manila Minor Bugs, Gotcha's and Workarounds

Every bit of software has its personality - features and flaws. Userland, being a busy company, can be excused for letting some minor things hang for extended periods of time. But they then become legacy issues. The point of this thread of thought is to put in a central repository combined experiences and ways around problems so that we can avoid losing time or pulling out what's left of our hair over minor details.

Here are a few installments.

• Using CSS and yourManilaWebsite 's homePage. If you use CSS to define text styles you will find that the bodytext section of your homePage of any given xxxManilaWebsite does not pickUp your designated class. This behaviour occurs only on the homePage, so if you flip your homePage, the behaviour will occur only on the active homePage The reason being is that the homePage enveloppes the bodytext section in an extra table, whereas all other pages do not have that table. Workaround Throw in a div or span tag with your class designation at the start of the bodytext box in EditThisPage mode. You ought to close it as well at the end of the box, eh?
• The Amazing Appearing Title at the start of the page In some instances, experienced in particular with metaData multipleTemplates or with auxiliaryTemplates from the ManilaFixer, you might notice that the title tag does not register and instead gets transformed into regular characters which are then rendered onto the page. Solution Make sure that your <title> tag has the word title start with a capital 'T' , or more to the point: <Title>
• Title tag and static rendering
  Furthermore, if you want to statically render the page generated via an auxiliaryTemplate, you will have to capitalise the closing tag </Title> as well.
• Getting rid of the dateLine You've created a site. Not a newsSite, but one based on stories (i.e. in prefs/newsItems, the flag newsItems feature is not enabled). And you do not want the data and time of creation to appear in front of every article. By some trick of multiple functionality and default behaviour at creation, it is not obvious how to do this. You may play with the template for news items, but that is not really efficient. Instead go to prefs/appearance and section homePage and put 1 as the value for "How many news days should appear on the home page?" - Yes, there is a curiosity there as to why newsDays should impact a stories-based site.
• No discussions links on my site's stories You have a content-oriented site, not a discussion-oriented site; you don't want the link beneath every article. Go to prefs/discussionGroup. In the Behaviour section you can leave the flag for 'newTopicLinkBeneathDGMessageListings' on (Yes) which will allow you to have discussions occur only in the 'Discuss' arena. But certainly take out in the Images section the contents of the inputBox for the question 'Specify an image tag to link to the discussion group'
• double-byte characters and the title tag. This is not a manila issue outright... But it took a while to realize what was going on. Internet Explorer does not take kindly to double-byte characters being called within the title tag. It does not render probably because the title tag is called within the head tag, as is the meta tag that defines the character set. IE in Mac will flow OK, Netscape is fine, but IE in windows versions givea a blank page. Worse IE may call an internal script that blocks popUps (Lord knows why) that a user may have installed in their firewall. In other words, forget using double-byte characters in the title tag.