OVERVIEW
Target audience: Site Administrators, Site Managers, Site Editors, Channels Editors
The McGill Web Management System (WMS) is a content management system that provides a user-friendly, feature-rich, centralized method of building and maintaining web pages. Occasionally issues are highlighted that may have a pending resolution, an effective workaround, or are considered to be expected behaviours.
In this article:
Browser issues
NOTE:
Check the list of supported browsers to see which browsers may be deprecated and no longer supported.
Browser |
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome 52 and higher | Text spacing issues (e.g. spaces missing between words) may occur when viewing Channels event items that are imported from another WMS site. | If you notice the problem, go into the Content > Source window of the original Channels item and add non-breaking space characters into the HTML code where needed. Example: You are here. |
| Edge 14, 15, 16 | WYSIWYG: Insert Special Character button does not work. | Add special characters by typing them in, or via copy/paste. |
| Firefox | When using Firefox to print pages from the WMS, a “break” is inserted before tables so that the table is printed in the following page. This affects printing to PDFs as well. | Use a different browser (Chrome) when printing pages with tables. If you are restricted to working with Firefox, you can install an add-on that can convert webpages to PDF. |
| iOS and Android | Slideshows with the Slide Caption Thumbnail – Alt preset that are placed in the Top of Page region will display two lines of thumbnails instead of one if there are more than 4 slides. | Place the slideshow in the Top of Content region. |
Channels Issues
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| By default, Channels content created in the WPS resides on the Channels Hub and not within individual WMS sites. Because no more than 100 items per language can be imported into a WMS site from the Hub or other sites, there is no easy way for site manager to access all this legacy content. | Link to the Channels Archives with parameters to retrieve the items you want. |
| Email addresses are not displayed correctly in the body of distributed Channels items (e.g., name[at]mcgill[dot]ca). | Go to Contact and enter the email addresses in the Email field. |
Content issues
Category |
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|---|
| Blocks | Images inserted with the WYSIWYG editor with Border and image caption are resized to infinitesimal. | Standard blocks: Do not apply a Border and image caption to inserted images All other blocks: Use the image field provided |
| Pages | You may encounter a bug wherein unpublished pages continue to appear published to site visitors for up to an hour later. This is due to the node cache failing to expire until another operation is performed. | Make another change on the site and change the moderation state again (e.g., Needs Review to Published); this will force the cache to expire. |
| The status in the "Menu settings" tab always remains "Not in menu" even if the "Menu link title" field is populated. | N/A | |
| The status in the "URL path settings" tab remains as "No alias" even if the "Custom alias" field is populated. | N/A | |
| The @ symbol may become automatically hyperlinked even when it's not used in the format of an email address, e.g., "Média@McGill" | Wrap the symbol with a span tag: <span>@</span> | |
| The Promoted to front page option, available in the Publishing options settings of most content types, is non-functional. | N/A | |
| iframes are not supported in the WMS. They risk compromising the security of the WMS and is poor for SEO (search engine optimization), bookmarking, linking and performance. | N/A | |
| To see who was the last person to make revisions to a page, go to the Moderate tab. In there you will also see the history of all revisions made to the page. | N/A | |
| Clicking Unpublish this revision will unpublish not only the current one, but all revisions of the page/node. | N/A | |
| Restricted pages have a different layout from normal pages. Restricted content is treated as a different content type, and all images and files appear in a list at the bottom of the page; images and files should not be inserted within the Body of restricted pages. | N/A | |
| When using CTRL+F inside the source editor, pressing Enter does not advance to the next result. | You must press CTRL+F and Enter each time to go to the next result. Note: Using the browser’s Find function is currently not an effective workaround because it does not always work. This is under investigation. | |
| Translation | For English nodes containing images with captions, translating the page into French should enable the caption to also be translated. However, once the draft of the French page is published, the caption (and border) disappears. | Upload a duplicate of the image on the French page and use this for creating French captions |
Images/Media issues
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| Adding multiple files to the same ordered list item may not render all the files. | Only add a single file to any ordered list item OR copy-paste the HTML from Source view and add it to the list item. |
| Images with embedded email links will display the image with double the height. For best practice, do not embed images with emails because this does not meet accessibility standards. | N/A |
| The gallery presentation setting of "Show media on a full page" is not recommended. Instead, a better option to use is "Show media in a lightbox". However, there is currently a bug with both presentation settings whereby the Nivo Slider captions will not display. | N/A |
| Dragging the corner of an image to resize it does not work; you must choose one of the image size options (small, medium, large) available by selecting the image and clicking the Add Media button on the WYSIWYG toolbar. | N/A |
| SWF files are not supported in the WMS. | N/A |
| Images occasionally upload incorrectly and display grey boxes (the url for the image is wrong) | The image codes should be deleted in the <source> editor, then the images should be re-uploaded using the usual procedure in the visual editor |
| When using the Credit field on an image, the text on the page cannot be aligned to the right or left of the image. | To align text with the photo, use a border and caption on the photo instead of an image credit. |
| Files uploaded using Create Content > File Upload sometimes disappear, and the link is broken. | All files should be uploaded directly on a page using the recommended process. |
Menu issues
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| Orphaned published nodes do not appear on Structure > Menu > Main menu > list links. | Please note that orphaned published pages will not appear on Structure > Menu > Main menu > list links. This happens when parent pages are deleted and child pages are not assigned a new parent. When deleting parent pages, be sure to assign child pages to a new parent. |
| Menu items that don't appear on the horizontal menu because they don't fit will in fact display when viewed on mobile devices. Be sure to check your menu structure and disable any menu items that should not display so that both the mobile and desktop versions of the site appear the same. Ideally, menu items that are no longer needed should be removed from the menu structure by unpublishing the page. | N/A |
| You cannot add menu links directly to the menu structure through Structure > Menus. In order to add a new menu item, it must be created as a page (or node) within the WMS and can be attached to a parent menu from the Menu settings of the Add Content page, or via the Structure > Menus drag & drop interface once it is created. | N/A |
| In order to ensure usability and consistency across the WMS, menu items should only link to nodes within the same site. Links to other sites, even if also managed by you, should only appear within content (pages, blocks, slideshows, etc.). | N/A |
| The Structure > Menus drag & drop interface may not work for sites that have a large number of menu items. | Click "Show row weights" (or turn off JavaScript) and re-order menu items by weight instead. Alternatively, if you have an extremely large number of menu items, contact the IT Service Desk via the "Report an issue" webform to request support from the Web Service Group. |
Profile issues
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| If your site is enabled for Profiles, the Index block may not appear immediately in the Structure > Blocks admin page. | Wait about 30 minutes and it will appear in the Disabled section at the bottom of the Blocks page. |
Roles & access issues
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| Site appears to be "currently unavailable", in "maintenance mode": Sites that are not yet live (either in staging or www.mcgill.ca) appear to be "Operating in maintenance mode". Please ignore these messages. | N/A |
Webform issues
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| Changing the components of a webform once submissions have already been received can interfere negatively with existing submission results and is not advised. | If you need to change a webform, it is highly recommended that you create a new webform and you can do so by cloning the form. |
| Webforms content type 'Limited select option' does not work with conditionals. | N/A |
| The Unique Values validation rule only compares values submitted within the same page of the webform; i.e., it won't work if you would like the rule to compare values submitted for components on different pages; the page break(s) would need to be removed. | N/A |
| When submitting a webform, you get the following message: "There was a problem with your form submission. Please wait X seconds and try again." This happens when the login to the webform is anonymous. It is a security feature to prevent spambots flooding anonymous webforms. | Login to the webform with your McGill ID if you have one, or if you don’t have a McGill ID, wait and resubmit the webform. |
| Some of the tokens in webforms may seem to be named oddly (e.g., [current-user:field_mcgill_user_name] gives you the first name and last name of the currently logged in user, whereas [current-user:name] actually gives you the person's McGill Username). The descriptions in the IT Knowledge Base article Using Token Values in WMS Webforms are correct. | N/A |
| When a site has more than 1000 webform components across all their webforms (including unpublished forms), it may not be possible to add the Webform Submission component to a form. | Reduce the number of webforms on the site. |
Editoria11y accessibility checker
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| The Channels News block causes the error message “Channels item link title not found”. This is because the thumbnail image associated with the news item is wrapped in a link to the news story, but provides no alternative text that could explain the function of that link for the screen reader. | There is no workaround. This issue will be resolved when the new version (Drupal 9) of the platform used by the WMS is released. |
| The Accordion can cause the error message “Heading jumped from level 1 to 3” if there is no Heading 2 preceding it on the page. | Add a Heading 2 above the accordion, or change the heading level of each accordion panel to Heading 2. |
| The Articles with thumbnails block can cause the error message “Heading jumped from level 1 to 3” if there is no Heading 2 preceding it on the page. | Add a Block title. |
| The Articles with thumbnails block can cause the error message “image marked as decorative”, indicating the image has no alt tag, even for images that have alt tags. This is because the alt tags are not included on this view. | There is no workaround. This issue will be resolved when the new version (Drupal 9) of the platform used by the WMS is released. |
| Links to files such as pdfs and Word documents cause the error message “Manual check needed: link to document”. This is because accessibility considerations extend to documents hosted on the WMS, but the accessibility checker cannot access those documents. | Create accessible documents. If you need assistance with this, consider attending Creating accessible documents in Microsoft 365. |
Workbench issues
Issue |
Workaround |
|---|---|
| Bulk operations e.g., selecting and publishing several pages at once, are not available. | N/A |
| The File List page does not show the nodes where files have been placed. | To find out where a file or image is used, click on the filename; then click the Usage tab; this lists all nodes that reference the file. |
Resolved issues
| Category | Issue | Workaround | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Menu | In your site’s vertical menu, if your menu item displays as a parent but has no child items, or if your menu item does not include the parent(arrow) indicator even though it has child items, you will need to apply a workaround to fix this. | Add a new temporary child item by creating a new page — this child item must appear beneath the parent menu item on the menu structure admin page (Structure > Menus > Main menu > list links). Save the menu structure. Delete the child item and re-save the menu structure. The temporary page should also be deleted. |
