Well, it’s raining in Detroit today, but it beats shoveling snow. To celebrate the arrival of the new season (well, in theory) here are a couple of reminders & some details for specific questions we’ve seen more than once.

1) ‘locked items’ in Gryphon – the How & Why…

Items in Gryphon become ‘locked’ the second they’re opened by a user in the backend. If another users attempts to edit the same item it will show as locked to avoid the possibility of overwriting the original user’s work. When the original user clicks away from the item, normally the lock would be immediately cleared…

But if the original user leaves the item by closing the tab or navigating to an external site, etc, the lock would remain in effect, because Gryphon has no way of determining that the page is closed… which means the best way to leave a post or article is to click out of it within Gryphon itself. That’s the only way Gryphon can actually register the action and manage the locks correctly.

Two related points: Admin users can clear inadvertent locks manually in the backend. Also, equally important, article locks will reset after 15 minutes (i.e. if the user didn’t navigate away within Gryphon).

2) in Gryphon, Accessibility Matters, even for the polls…

Accessibility is an incredibly important aspect of good Web design, and one we take seriously. Wherever non-accessible technologies like Flash are used we strive to provide a fallback option — both for users with unsupported browsers and those requiring assistive technologies.

For example, take the web poll. While the poll results are displayed in an animated pie chart in browsers with both a Flash plugin and JavaScript enabled, a simple HTML list is displayed whenever JavaScript is disabled. You can see it for yourself by turning off JavaScript in your browser’s preferences – and then viewing the poll results, which should now display in screen-reader friendly text instead of the animated graphic.

3) when using any web tools, don’t forget your fundamentals (Filenames Matter too.)

By way of reminder, here’s a handful of filenaming conventions that we strongly recommend for best results, both in Gryphon and Fotobroker, and virtually any time you upload a file to the Web:

• Use all lowercase letters
• No spaces
• No special characters (”&”)
• Only one single “.” character — immediately before the file extension (jpg)

In some cases, the software is actually able to parse the filename despite violations of one or more of these rules, but good filenames to begin with are a better long term plan. If you’re importing files, and there’s an error you haven’t seen before, take a close look at the filename first. It may save us both a step.