Major Website Update

Due to the ending of support for the version of the tool used to build the Circle website, it has been necessary to upgrade to the latest version. There are significant changes to how some aspects of the tool work, meaning that it has been necessary to change how some features of the website work.

1. Look and feel – The templates that control how the website looks and feels have changed between the versions and the template used for the old site is not compatible with the new version. A new template has been used and is functional but is likely to be changed over time.


2. Search – The new version of the software has a completely new search system that is very different to the old version. The site is indexed and the search results are derived from the index, not from the actual pages There are two main impacts from this:


1. Data pages – As data pages are populated dynamically as you click on them, they are not included in the index and so are not included in the search results. Our website has over 40 data pages, (covering meetings, portfolios, drawings, sales, published drawings list, website updates and more), so not being able to search these is not an option! To overcome this issue, a different data page technology has been employed that loads all of the data onto the page "behind the scenes" and dynamically changes the view to implement paging, sorting and searching in the same way as the previous pages. In other words, all the data is held on one very long page, but you, the user, only see some of the records at once and are told you're looking at Page 1 of 10. However, as all of the records have to be extracted and sorted to populate that very long (partially displayed) page, there may be a short delay before the final formatted ‘paged’ view is displayed. However, as a bonus, the search is now immediate, so displayed data is updated as each character is typed into the search box.


2. Page based search results – If a web page has more than one occurrence of the search term, the search results will have only a single entry for the page, not as previously an entry for each instance. Therefore, there is no way of knowing if the search hit is for a single instance on the page or for many instances. (The search result does show the text around the hit with the search term highlighted and if that section of text includes other instances, they are also highlighted). This makes it more difficult to be sure you have seen all the instances of the search term on a page. Dependent of the page type the following strategies can help:


1. Plain text on a page – Every instance of the search term on the page is highlighted, so it should be relatively easy, if the page is not too long, to scroll down to see all the instances. Where the page is too long to make this easy then entering the search term again in the browser's search function, (Ctrl-F in many browsers), will enable you to skip between the search result instances.


2. In a dropdown list on a page – Where a page uses a dropdown list, (usually to select an item to view), the text within the dropdown IS included in the search results, but is NOT highlighted. Neither can it be found using the browser's search function. Often the result will be a page with no highlighting visible. The only option here is to dropdown the list and scroll down it to find the search term yourself.


3. In a data page – As in plain text pages, all instances of the search term are highlighted. However, with potentially thousands of data rows, only a few of which are shown on the current page, scrolling through all the rows to see those highlighted could be very time consuming. The best approach is to type the search term onto the data page’s search box as well, filtering the displayed page to show only those rows with the search term. Although this may be inconvenient, it will be quick.