ektron

Ektron 8.5 adding temporary paragraphs. Why?

We are running Ektron 8.50 SP2(Build 8.5.0.356) / eWebEditPro.

The issue we are seeing is when a smart form text field is left blank it is randomly filled with the following...

<Body>
<p title="temporary paragraph, click here to add a new paragraph">&#160;</p
</Body>

Anyone else come across this?

I realize the most obvious 'next step' would be to upgrade. Unfortunately for many reasons this is not an option.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks, ozmo

Solution

  • You're right, the obvious answer is to upgrade. Ektron moved from eWebEditPro to Aloha as the editor of choice precisely because of issues like this that cropped up as they fought to strike the right balance between cleanliness and usability (prior to this issue, editors would complain that they couldn't get the cursor into the blank space as they wanted... it was a mess).

    So my first question is: why can't you upgrade? Is it a business problem or a technology problem?

    No other editor is going to be embeddable into the workarea besides, perhaps, their old ActiveX plugin that only works in IE and probably not some of the later versions.

    So without an upgrade on the table, your only other options are to:

    1. Edit outside of the workarea. This would require you to create and secure your own admin pages, but it would allow you to set up the form for input however you like and with whatever editor you like, as long as you XML encode any special characters (which is different from HTML encoding; note the 'space' above is   and not  ).

    2. Create an extension (aka "Content Strategy") which would do the clean-up you want as the item is being saved or published. Documentation for creating a strategy is in the Ektron docs, accessible through http://documentation.ektron.com (redirects to Episerver World, but to the page with links to the docs). You would have to create the strategy, insert your own logic, then add it to the site.

    Let me know if there's more info I can provide. But I can't solve for this specific case since I don't have a comparable version of Ektron installed anywhere.