Its about time...

Oracle has finally released the much anticipated update to the Site Studio contributor. The old one used an ActiveX control, and only worked in IE. The new one has been in development for about three years now... and works on all browsers and platforms. Free update for 10gr3 users, so have at it!

Update: this contributor will eventually be released for Site Studio 7.7 and Content Server 7.5.1... they have a set of patches to enable it, they just need to finish the testing phase. Stay tuned!

The engineers did a pretty cool job of abstracting the editing layer from the data layer... so its easy to plug in whatever contributor you want. The released version uses the Java-based Ephox editor... but you could use a pure JavaScript one (like the FCKEditor) with a bit of effort... likewise, you could use Adobe Flex to create a desktop version of the contributor app, if one were so inclined...

I like the Ephox editor... it has a ton of cool new features, and I think everybody will be pleased with this change. My favorite feature is the styles drop-down: it shows you what the CSS styles look like in the name, and breaks them down into block- and inline-styles. That way, people unfamiliar with using styles to pick colors/fonts/sizes/etc, can use the preview as a guide. With a good web designer, that can give the site a highly polished look...

Oracle is hosting a web content management conference on April 16th. They should be demo-ing the new editor... so sign up if you'd like to see it in action.

Since browsing Oracle Metalink for patches is a baffling ordeal, Alan Baer kindly put together a table with the names of all the patches you'll need... You're required to install 3 or 4 patches, depending on which version of the content server you have: