This tech tip is a preview of unreleased software. The details and appearances of certain elements may change between now and the final release.

WebLink 8 introduces the new WebLink 8 Designer, which enables you to customize the look and feel of your WebLink site with an easy-to-use utility. You can customize the theme of your site, the Welcome Page, navigation buttons, the Document Viewer, how search results are displayed, and other search options without writing any code. This tech tip will be a preview of the Theme, Welcome Page, Navigation, Document Viewer, Search Results, and Search Options tabs of the WebLink Designer.

Theme

When first opening the utility, you will see the Theme tab where you can add new logos to and customize the basic colors of your WebLink site. You can customize further by changing each page to use different colors. For example, the text color on the Login Page can be blue while the text color in the Folder Browser can be green. Alternatively, you can customize all text of the Web site to be the same color.

Welcome Page

The Welcome Page is the first page users will see when opening the WebLink Web site. The Welcome Page tab enables you to customize the title of the page that will be displayed in the Web browser and the text that introduces users to the WebLink site. You can choose whether or not you want to display the Quick Search, add Bookmarks, add Search Forms, or do a combination of these. For example, if you want users to be able to access a specific document via a single-click rather than searching the entire repository for it, add a bookmark linking to that specific document to the Welcome Page and remove the Quick Search. If you want users to perform a date and entry name search, create a custom search form with these search types included, link it to the Welcome Page, and remove the Quick Search.

Bookmarks and a search form configured

Welcome page with the bookmarks and search form displayed

Navigation

You can customize whether you want links to the Welcome Page, the Folder Browser, and/or the Search Pane displayed below the WebLink logo. These links can help users navigate quickly to certain sections of your WebLink site.

The Welcome Page, Folder Browser, and Search Pane links are configured in the Navigation tab.

The three links are displayed in WebLink.

Document Viewer

The Document Viewer tab enables you to customize the default cursor mode, the zoom level, and whether or not searching for documents in WebLink via the Internet will highlight the term you searched when opening the document from the search results. The cursor mode can be configured to either scroll through or zoom into pages when using the mouse scroll wheel and the default zoom level is how the document should be displayed in the Document Viewer when first opening it. You can view the entire document page or fit the width of the document to the width of the Document Viewer.

Search Results

The manner in which search results are displayed when users perform searches can be customized. You can hide/display entry properties, user-selected fields, context hits, thumbnails, and/or metadata. For example, if the thumbnails are taking up too much space, you can hide them so users can’t access them at all, or you can minimize them so users can expand and view them as needed. Changes made to the search results can be displayed in the preview pane at the bottom of the Search Results tab. You can rearrange the different components of each result and configure additional options for entry properties and user-selected fields.

Search Options

The Search Options tab enables you to configure the Quick Search to search text, entry names, fields, or annotations – or do a combination of these depending on how you want users searching for entries in WebLink. You also have the option to enable fuzzy searches which allow you to find all words or phrases that are similar to what you’re searching for. Additionally, you can configure a minimum number of field values users must input when performing template searches, which forces users to make searches more specific. For example, this would be useful for repositories containing documents that are all assigned the same template. In that case, performing a template search with no field values will not only make the search slow, but will also return every document in your repository.

Tags: WebLink

Posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 8:21 am under Support, UserNews. You can comment on this post.