Alfresco 3.1.1 and paragraph tags

Right now I am getting to grips with the finer details of an Alfresco v3.1.1 installation. It has been fun*.

Today's quest was all about stopping the TinyMCE plugin that Alfresco uses from wrapping absolutely everything in a <p> tag. Usually I love <p> tags. Way more than I love <br>tags. But not all content entered through a CMS should be wrapped in them.

I found this bug report, which mentioned a rather drastic way of fixing it, but also gave some clues as to another, less invasive, way. The hunt was on. A few hours later (it would have been a few minutes if I had thought to clear my browser cache), I came up with the following:

(DISCLAIMER: The following changes will be lost if you upgrade/replace your Alfresco installation. But since this issue doesn't occur in any other version of Alfresco, that should be ok.)

Step 1: Open up <tomcat>/webapps/alfresco/scripts/ajax/xforms.js

Step 2: Find the definition of alfresco.constants.TINY_MCE_DEFAULT_SETTINGS (it is near the end) and change it to be:

alfresco.constants.TINY_MCE_DEFAULT_SETTINGS =
{
theme: "advanced",
mode: "exact",
plugins: alfresco.constants.TINY_MCE_DEFAULT_PLUGINS,
width: -1,
height: -1,
auto_resize: false,
force_p_newlines: false,
encoding: "UTF-8",
entity_encoding: "raw",
add_unload_trigger: false,
add_form_submit_trigger: false,
theme_advanced_toolbar_location: "top",
theme_advanced_toolbar_align: "left",
theme_advanced_buttons1: "",
theme_advanced_buttons2: "",
theme_advanced_buttons3: "",
urlconverter_callback: "alfresco_TinyMCE_urlconverter_callback",
file_browser_callback: "alfresco_TinyMCE_file_browser_callback",
forced_root_block: false,
force_br_newlines: true
};

Note the two last lines.

When you are done, all you need to do is clear your browser's cache, and go edit some web content in Alfresco. Anything you create from now on will no longer be wrapped in the usually wonderful <p> tags.

*This depends on your definition of fun.

New version of FBConnectAuth released: 1.0

One year on, I've just released a minor enhancement to the tiny open source project I created called FBConnectAuth - Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET.

This release contains two enhancements:

• It supports Facebook's new Graph API Javscript SDK (but remains backwards compatible)
• It works in partially trusted environments

It is specifically targeted at .NET 2.0 (as was the previous release) for the benefit of those who don't have control over their production environment.

Interestingly, I noticed that the new Graph API requires the use of the Facebook Application's "Application ID", rather than "API Key". This means that an example of using FBConnectAuth looks with the Graph API like this:

//Note this is the "app id", not "api Key"
FBConnectAuthentication auth = new FBConnectAuthentication(appId,appSecret);
if (auth.Validate() != ValidationState.Valid)
{
    // The request does not contain the details
    // of a valid Facebook connect session.
    // You'll probably want to throw an error here.
}
else
{
    FBConnectSession fbSession = auth.GetSession();

    string userId = fbSession.UserID;
    string sessionKey = fbSession.SessionKey;

    //This is the Graph API access token
    //(available only when using the Graph API)
    string accessToken = fbSession.AccessToken;

    // The above values can now be used to communicate
    // with Facebook on behalf of your user,
    // perhaps using the Facebook Developer Toolkit

    // The expiry time and session secret is also available.
}

If you are interested, go take a look.