Give user customization choice - web-services

I've seen that this site allows users to customize their questions through some marks (headers with **. Underlined..... Bold...)
So how to do this .
Here is what I know: html- php-javascript-ruby:
Is it possible to obtain this with my knowledge

There are open source javascript markdown processors. like this one or that one

Related

Is there any good reason to have Sitecore Media url's including tilde?

I could see blog post from 2011 recommending using "-" instead of "~".
What is the best practice to write media URL in Sitecore 6.5 on .NET 4.0/IIS7.5? Should I keep default /~/media/ or follow blog post advice using /-/media/ or while I am there, why not just use /media/?
I suspect the use of ~ is for legacy reasons. The current recommendation is to use -/media as you point out, but you could use whatever you wanted and it would work. The issue you have just using /media/ is if there is any other item with that as part of the name then it will trigger the media handler, rather than serving up your content for example.
For example, as request for /blah/blah/blah/-/media/images/logo.png will serve up the image correctly, /about/media/news/2013/12/20/sitecore.aspx should in fact serve up a page but will trigger the media handler and return a 404 just using /media/. So if you are going to use something else then make sure it is unique, you may need to enforce it since content editors can be a bit funny about remembering things like this.
Since you are currently using Sitecore 6.5 then I can assume you have existing content. Make sure you leave the existing ~/media trigger to allow your Rich Text fields to continue to work
If you update the Media.MediaLinkPrefix setting on a system that
already has some content in a database, Sitecore may not update the
values in all Rich Text Editor fields that contain values in the old
formats, including inline images and links to media items.
Sitecore Idiosyncrasies: Media URLs
I would probably go ahead and set Media.RequestExtension to an empty string so that image urls are served up with the correct media extension too.
I know this problem appear just when are you using .Net Framework 2.0
Please see next link .
If you run your website under .Net Framework 4.0 and IIS 7.5 you don't have this vulnerability.
Also this document explain a little bit about using of tilde.
Also you can check John West blog about /~/media
So the conclusion is use -/media for media files.
For projects using Sitecore 7.2, you may want to stick to using a tilde or apply the hot-fix mentioned in the following KB article.
https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/998758

Multi language website, how to approach this?

I have a website (Coldfusion) on which I want to offer multi language, but no idea what is the best way to do this.
There 2 plans I have:
1:
Of course all content (text) is in a database.
If a user would want a different language, the user would click on a link/flag, this would put the requested language in a session variable, for example: session.language = "es"
In the database I would have 2 columns (every language has 1 column) and then select the text which belongs to 'es'
Every page would then do a request to the database to get the text beloging to the session.language.
PROS: Relatively simple to implement
CONS: SEO wise I don't think this could be very good. http:// www.domain.com/page.cfm would give an english text or spanish text (or other language). Google will not add duplicate URL's
2:
Do something with http:// www.domain.com/en/page.cfm for english and http:// www.domain.com/es/page.cfm for english.
With a URL rewrite rule the language value in the URL http:// www.domain.com/en/page.cfm would actually be a page http:// www.domain.com/page.cfm?language=en
The url.language variable will then select the correct language from the database.
PROS: Unique URL for each language. Good for SEO and Google indexing.
CONS: A bit more difficult to implement. (I think)
Or does anyone have other / better ideas?
Thanks!!
You should always first check the browser header "Accept-Language" for the default language(s) (the correct standard way to do it), and offer links (the intuitively seemingly right way) only as an alternative.
Doing it in a database doesn't seem very standard. Let's assume you would like to use MVC architecture (model-view-controller). Most software uses keys in the presentation layer (view) (eg. html) and along with the presentation layer, you have language files (in Java, this is typically properties files) which are mapped simply by their filenames, and can be modified by regular users, without any special skills, such as professional translators with no computer skills. Certainly you could put it in a database, but then it is just more work, and moves the information out of the presentation layer.
There are various libraries for doing this. You should find the normal one for your application. Please edit your question to include what you are using to develop the application. (eg. JSP, Tapestry, Wicket, ASP, PHP, etc.) So for example, if you wanted to use JSPs, I would then suggest you use the JSTL tag library's language support. Or if you were using Tapestry, I would point you to http://tapestry.apache.org/localization.html or http://tapestry.apache.org/tapestry4.1/UsersGuide/localization.html
To look it up, you can look for the terms "internationalization" aka "i18n", or "localization". (The terms don't mean the same thing, but few use them correctly, so either works. http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-i18n)
I would go for option 2. Every translation should have its own url. Links to your website will already be in the intended translation.
To store translations in a database, I wouldn't put every translation in a seperate column, but rather put them in a seperate table:
Table Posts:
- id
- title_id
- ...
Table Translations:
- label_id
- value
- country_code
- language_code
Where title_id matches label_id
This way you won't have to alter your table structure when a new translation is added. This allows you to have infinite translations for any label or text.
To effectively do a multi-lingual site then you need set a rule for yourself that NO TEXT is ever put in the source as hard coded. It either needs to come from the database and / or a Resource Bundle.
Text from the database
You need to make sure that the column you are storing your data in is unicode otherwise you'll have issues with accented character. Also don't have a column per language as this is not scalable, do what #jan suggests and have a translations table where the items are keyed on a reference as well as a language.
Resource bundles
You are not going to want to get every last little bit of text from the database so for those you can utilise a resource bundle. This is an, admittedly old, link http://www.sustainablegis.com/blog/cfg11n/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=FD48909C-50FC-543B-1FE177C1B97E8CC1 from Paul Hastings's blog about some solutions to resource bundles. To be honest his blog is an excellent resource on this very subject.
With regards to how you handle the URLs do not do option 1 as you quite rightly identified you will cause issues the SEO rankings of the page and it will mean that users cannot correctly share or return to the page.
Two approaches are having the language code in the URL as you identified in option 1.
Pros
Simpler to configure
Cons
You have one application which means that as you add more languages you add more complexity and weight on the memory of that app
Or you can have a different sub domain or domain per application e.g. es.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.es they can all be the same codebase
Pros
Each language is a standalone application meaning it has it's own memory
Cons
more effort to configure
http://i18n.riaforge.org/ has a download for i18n. It can be used to make sure that all string labels match. That way if some one wants to change "Save" to "Update", it can all be done in one spot.
It is also important to consider the technical background of those that will being doing the translation. It is often easier to get the translation team to edit files in notepad as opposed to updating a db. Text files work well with version control.
The best way i found is to use an XML to hold just that pages language stuff, one xml to cover each page, and you then vary it for language. when the page loads, just load a different XML from the database or files... many ways to do this. all other methods i have tried have their issues, and at least this one allows you to take a language XML, hand it to someone who will copy it, and then change the boxes... you put it in the DB to serve it.
one can also do this for text, and have the DB make the XML for just the text for that page by using a list of items to include in the XML for the page.
once you get the idea, the rest becomes very easy...
and given CF ways of accessing such data with dot notation, easy peasy to us
say you have "Load Images"
in english xml it may be <LoadIMGS>Load Images</LoadIMGS>
in chinese it may be <LoadIMGS>加载图像</LoadIMGS>
or <LoadIMGS>Jiā zǎi túxiàng</LoadIMGS>
regardless, in your CFM code you would just put #variablename.LoadIMGS# in the place... i would also suggest putting in the loadimages tag the size the font should be adjusted to if not normal size. that way, when translations are too large, you can shrink that font there for that... etc.
enjoy!!!

Cleansing string / input in Coldfusion 9

I have been working with Coldfusion 9 lately (background in PHP primarily) and I am scratching my head trying to figure out how to 'clean/sanitize' input / string that is user submitted.
I want to make it HTMLSAFE, eliminate any javascript, or SQL query injection, the usual.
I am hoping I've overlooked some kind of function that already comes with CF9.
Can someone point me in the proper direction?
Well, for SQL injection, you want to use CFQUERYPARAM.
As for sanitizing the input for XSS and the like, you can use the ScriptProtect attribute in CFAPPLICATION, though I've heard that doesn't work flawlessly. You could look at Portcullis or similar 3rd-party CFCs for better script protection if you prefer.
This an addition to Kyle's suggestions not an alternative answer, but the comments panel is a bit rubbish for links.
Take a look a the ColdFusion string functions. You've got HTMLCodeFormat, HTMLEditFormat, JSStringFormat and URLEncodedFormat. All of which can help you with working with content posted from a form.
You can also try to use the regex functions to remove HTML tags, but its never a precise science. This ColdFusion based regex/html question should help there a bit.
You can also try to protect yourself from bots and known spammers using something like cfformprotect, which integrates Project Honeypot and Akismet protection amongst other tools into your forms.
You've got several options:
"Global Script Protection" Administrator setting, which applies a regular expression against post and get (i.e. FORM and URL) variables to strip out <script/>, <img/> and several other tags
Use isValid() to validate variables' data types (see my in depth answer on this one).
<cfqueryparam/>, which serves to create SQL bind parameters and validate the datatype passed to it.
That noted, if you are really trying to sanitize HTML, use Java, which ColdFusion can access natively. In particular use the OWASP AntiSamy Project, which takes an HTML fragment and whitelists what values can be part of it. This is the same approach that sites like SO and slashdot.org use to protect submissions and is a more secure approach to accepting markup content.
Sanitation of strings in coldfusion and in quite any language is very important and depends on what you want to do with the string. most mitigations are for
saving content to database (e.g. <cfqueryparam ...>)
using content to show on next page (e.g. put url-parameter in link or show url-parameter in text)
saving files and using upload filenames and content
There is always a risk if you follow the idea to prevent and reduce a string by allow basically everything in the first step and then sanitize malicious code "away" by deleting or replacing characters (blacklist approach).
The better solution is to replace strings with rereplace(...) agains regular expressions that explicitly allow only the characters needed for the scenario you use it as an easy solution, whenever this is possible. use cases are inputs for numbers, lists, email-addresses, urls, names, zip, cities, etc.
For example if you want to ask for a email-address, you could use
<cfif reFindNoCase("^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+#[A-Z0-9.-]+\.(?:[A-Z]{5})$", stringtosanitize)>...ok, clean...<cfelse>...not ok...</cfif>
(or an own regex).
For HTML-Imput or CSS-Imput I would also recommend OWASP Java HTML Sanitizer Project.

Please advice the folder structure for Handling multiple sites in Django

alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?387990357b.jpg
Please see the folder structure image in the above url mentioned please advice which structure would be best suited for better code managibility. If the above image is not gettign please use this url http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?387990357b.jpg
As far as automated deployment goes, It would appear to me that your second option would be better... that will allow you to "pick up" either site 1 or site 2 all at once and drop it anywhere you want.
I use virtualenv to manage multiple sites, which is basically an extension of the second option: each with their own code base and settings file and modules.
this looks good: http://www.mail-archive.com/django-users#googlegroups.com/msg75840.html

How to define parent and subpages in Trac?

I know the Confluence wiki pretty well, and I like much the natural hierarchy of pages you get there. I have to use now a Trac wiki (which is not that bad, same root as MoinMoin), and am searching the feature here. What I want to reach:
Edit the page "MyPage" and enter there the link to a page you want to be a subpage, eg. MySubPage.
The link should be similar to /MySubPage or [/MySubPage]. The character "/" denotes that the resulting page should be a subpage of the current one.
Follow the link, create the new page with some content.
You should now see, that "MySubPage" is a subpage of "MyPage". You could reach the subpage from anywhere by the link MyPage/MySubPage.
The MoinMoin wiki has that feature at least from version 1.5.x, and I have used that regularily. Is there something similar in Trac? Do I have to install then a plugin?
Thank you a lot
Markus
Well, not the best thing to answer the own question, but just something I found out.
* SubpageFirst
* SubpageSecond
* SubpageThird
* SubpageFourth
leads to (of course) four pages, but when you have a look at them in Title Index, you will see:
* Subpage
* First
* Second
* Third
* Fourth
Not what I have searched for, but comes near.
The only way I have found to do something like this is to specify the full path to the page. For your example this would be [[MyPage/MySubPage]]. You then get a hierarchy in TitleIndex, but it leaves much to be desired in terms of presenting a Parent/Child relationship.
I think, as retracile mentioned, that MyPage/MySubPage does not create a true hierarchy, but rather just a page containing a forward slash in the name, and in TitleIndex the pages are presented such that they appear to be in a hierarchy (but often do not display the way you would like; as I mentioned it leaves much to be desired).
Parent-child wiki pages aren't directly modeled in Trac. Essentially, "/" is allowed as part of a wiki page name.
You should be able to create a macro that does something like what you want; essentially:
[[sub(MySubPage)]]