This is not mentioned in the Site.Com documentation, but are there only specific elements within which you can place a data repeater?

I have a page template that has both editable content blocks and editable code blocks. When I attempt to add a data repeater to the page, I get the message "There is no place for this element" and trying to drag & drop a data repeater onto the page shows the red circle with a slash through it, regardless of where on the page I attempt to place it.

It would be useful if the documentation actually stated the restrictions on where various objects can or cannot be placed.

Thank you.

I'm shocked that the basic Site.Com functionality still has not been improved beyond the state it was in at this time last year. It still behaves like an alpha product.

Basic CMS functionality such as being able to apply a different template to a page does not exist. If you have an existing page and wish to "reskin it" using a different page template, you cannot. You are forced to rebuild the page completely from scratch. You cannot apply a different page style to content.

This is VERY basic CMS functionality that is missing, but it is very important when developing or redeploying websites.

We won't even get into the notions of role-specific or user-specific page/content permissions, page versioning/rollback, or approval queues.

I reported quite a few bugs with site.com back in June and July of 2012, and spent CONSIDERABLE time working with Salesforce engineers in GoToMeeting sessions and phone calls documenting and reproducing bugs for them... and some of the most glaring bugs still have not been fixed:

1. The EditHTML overlay still does not have any word wrap, either configurable or otherwise. This makes porting content in from other platforms a MAJOR chore. The content just extends out to the right to infinity, and you have to either spend your time scrolling left-to-right, or put in hard line breaks in the content (which by the way is a very BAD idea, since everyone uses different sized browser windows, so the line lengths that work for me may not work for someone else).

2. There is no way to search the contents of that overlay; browser search only searches the underlying page.

3. There is no way to search a Site.Com instance for CSS or HTML code strings (actually, there is no way at all to search a Site.com site for anything).

4. When dragging an asset into the site and the list of files/folders is longer than the browser window is tall, there is no way to scroll up or down to get to the folder in which to place the asset. The Javascript scrolling behavior is incomplete.

There may be behind-the-scenes work that has been done on other aspects, but all the hair-pulling GUI shortcomings that make day-to-day maintenance of a full-fledged website in Site.Com outright painful are still there... for the money being charged for Site.Com it really needs to be more robust.

It's very frustrating to have seemingly wasted many hours of my time with support personnel, under the presumption that doing so would enable the bugs to be fixed, all the while paying for the "privilege"... to ultimately find that it has all amounted to naught thus far.

I've been told by Support that the manner in which this issue functions is by design, but it makes ZERO sense to me, and I'm hoping that someone can shed some insight.

Let's say I've published "Site A" within Site.Com at www.domainname.com and have been working on a rebranding/reskinning using "Site B" within Site.Com. We're ready to switch to the new design.

For some inexplicable reason it's not as simple as removing the domain name from "Site A" and adding it to "Site B". For one thing, Site.Com won't let you "unpublish" a site. Once a site is published it cannot be deleted or unpublished and you have used up your publication license in perpetuity (for smaller companies that may have only one publication license, rolling out new branding is now a big problem).

If I only have one license to publish within Site.Com, the system should be smart enough to (1) not allow me to have more live sites published than I have licenses for at any time, but (2) allow me to change on the fly the site within Site.Com that is the one that is being published!

Why is this forbidden?

Since page templates, pages, and other assets cannot be copied from one site to another, if you have only 1 license, you effectively cannot ever rebrand a website within Site.Com.

Domain/site management within Site.Com is unnecessarily clumsy and poorly thought out.... unless the whole motivation is to force customers to buy extra licenses they don't really need.

I find it hard to believe that Site.Com has made it this far without any way to search Content, HTML, or CSS across a given site. This makes global updates a very labor-intensive process.

Especially in light of the bug (which I filed this morning) where any page references that contain anchors, e.g., <a href="/Policies#refunds">Link</a> do NOT automatically get updated whenever a page name or location changes. Those links have to be tracked down and changed by hand.

I've had to resort to using a third-party spidering tool to search the published site externally to track down items that need to be edited.

If anyone knows of a workaround within Site.Com, I'd appreciate it.

As someone who is trying to port an existing site to Site.Com, there are three issues with the way Site.Com has implemented the HTML editor when editing a Custom Code element or using Edit HTML to edit a content block:

1. Word wrap is disabled by default and there is no way to turn it on. This means that long lines just extend into infinity off the right edge of the screen and one has to either scroll left and right, or manually insert hard returns in order to make text readable (not an elegant solution since the width of the HTML editor in the overlay is hard-coded to be based on the size of the underlying window, which will vary from person to person). Either make Word Wrap user-selectable, or turn it on by default.

2. There is no way to search the code in the editor. Using a browser window search only searches the underlying page content, not the contents of the editor overlay. This makes editing extended content a chore.

3. The number of spaces that TAB replaces needs to be a configurable option, not an arbitrary number.

I find myself having to copy code out of Site.Com into my own text editor to make changes and then copy it back, which is really a clumsy solution.

[UPDATE 6/6/12: I am editing this post as I get responses from support, as to whether the functions in question truly do not exist, or solutions if they do exist, but in a convoluted or hidden manner.]

[UPDATE 6/7/12: I had a GoToMeeting session with the VP of Site.Com Development and 3 support team members to go through my list. I have updated the list below with the results of that meeting. I have another meeting with them on 6/8/12 to replicate some of the bugs I discovered.]

I am frustrated beyond belief in that none of my support tickets are being replied to, even after 2 business days, there is virtually no documentation for this site.com beta product, and I am hitting serious brick walls with respect to functionality.

If any of you have discovered workarounds to any of these problems, I would greatly appreciate any sage words of wisdom. I can be contacted directly at dharding@illinois.edu

Some of the following are merely annoyances, but some are absolute showstoppers. I’ve bolded items that are critical, i.e., in order to fully port our existing site into site.com, we need to find a workaround.

1. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST BUT IS BEING CONSIDERED FOR FUTURE RELEASE) No versioning, rollback, or undo. Once something is deleted it is gone forever.
   
   
2. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST BUT IS BEING CONSIDERED FOR FUTURE RELEASE) No way to limit people's access to specific pages, let alone certain content blocks on those pages. All contributors and publishers have access to all pages. So if you have contributor access, you can edit all the content blocks on all pages in the site.
   
   
3. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST AND THIS IS BY DESIGN; IS NOT CONSIDERED A PROBLEM) Site.com does not have any check-in/check-out mechanism for content that is being edited. It does not check to see whether another user has a page or content block open for editing. It blithely allows multiple people to have the same content open simultaneously and the last one closed overwrites the others. This is going to make distributing the site content editorial responsibilities more dangerous than if this were a real CMS.
   
   
4. (CONFIRMED BY SUPPORT ON 6/5/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST) There does not appear to be any way to copy a page or template from one “site” to another. So if I clone the site in order to do major overhauls or unpublished development (because I don’t want to screw up the existing site) and I get a page or pages the way I want them, there is no way to port those pages back into the original site.
   
   
5. (CONFIRMED BY SUPPORT ON 6/5/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST) There does not appear to be a way to archive, save, or export a single page or resource. You can only export an entire site en masse. This, combined with #4, means that it is impossible to pull content from an older page or from a different site.
   
   
6. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST BUT IS DEFINITELY BEING DEVELOPED. FOR NOW I WILL HAVE TO HARDCODE ALL OF THE MENUS AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE THE SITE MAP TO REARRANGE PAGES WITHIN THE MENU) The navigation menu object appears to only support physical pages. There is no  provision to allow for menu items that are any of the following:
   
   1. A link to an external site
   2. An anchor link on a page, e.g., the submenu items being links to sections within the same physical page
   3. A menu item that is not a link, but rather an organizing “container” for more elements.
   This means either changing our entire menu structure to remove any elements that are not pages, or forgoing the built-in menu object and hardcoding the menus, which completely defeats the point of having a CMS and being able to move pages around on the fly.
   
   
7. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: DEFINITELY A SITE.COM BUG, BUT COULD OBTAIN NO INFORMATION ON WHAT "USE OTHER MAP" MEANS) The default Menu Source for the menu object is “Use Site Map”. There is another option called “Use Other Map”, but there is nothing in any documentation that explains what that option means. Moreover, selecting that option immediately generates a system error telling you to file a support ticket. (unimplemented feature perhaps?)
   
   
8. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING) Many objects display correctly in Site.com ONLY if they are created natively within the WYSIWYG environment. If you import them as HTML code, depending on the complexity of the object, all you get is a block of whitespace with a border. If you preview the page, it looks correct to the end user, but you have no way of using WYSIWYG tools to tweak it. You have to manually edit the HTML and CSS code.
   
   
9. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING) Positioning and sizing within the WYSIWYG editor is seriously off at times. What you ultimately see published is not what you see within the CMS.
   
   
10. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING; I WAS TOLD THAT SITE.COM SHOULD NEVER BE ALTERING CUSTOMER-SUPPLIED CSS; I TOLD THEM IT ISN'T EVEN CLOSE) Stylesheet importing: sometimes, if Site.Com encounters a tag that it does not understand, e.g., the “filter” CSS tag, it omits it along with any CSS after it for that element, even if the subsequent CSS is valid. This means manually checking CSS to make sure things are not dropped. This also precludes importing a fresh version of the stylesheet.
    
    
11. (SEE #10) Site.com re-renders CSS when you save, changing the syntax of some markup, regardless of how you have the markup specified. Site.com has taken the Microsoft “we’ll redo it for you” approach.
    
    
12. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING) When you duplicate a template that has child templates, it ONLY duplicates the parent, not the children. And since templates cannot be copied from one parent template into another, you are forced to manually recreate those child templates by hand.
    
    

To be blunt: for 5 figures a year, the current incarnation of site.com is is woefully and pitifully inadequate.

Background:

I have been tasked with porting our existing (external) website into site.com. No one at our organization has any experience with either site.com or salesforce in general, so I'm flying blind. I find the interface to be very nonintuitive, and the documentation exceedingly sparse (plus what little documentation exists is written from the perspective that the reader is already intimately familiar with the salesforce universe... not helpful). I've got 3 weeks to do this, with no opportunity for training. You can sense my stress...

Issue:

I know how to do an explort/import, but that only works for an entire site. What I want to do is copy a single page, page template, or asset from one site into another.

How can this be done?

Thank you in advance.

This is not mentioned in the Site.Com documentation, but are there only specific elements within which you can place a data repeater?

I have a page template that has both editable content blocks and editable code blocks. When I attempt to add a data repeater to the page, I get the message "There is no place for this element" and trying to drag & drop a data repeater onto the page shows the red circle with a slash through it, regardless of where on the page I attempt to place it.

It would be useful if the documentation actually stated the restrictions on where various objects can or cannot be placed.

Thank you.

Has anyone implemented a site search, like Google Site Search, in a Site.com site?

I've had experience before with products that feel like they are on their way to sunsetting and Site.com certainly feels that way. There have been few features added or even bug fixes, there is almost no activity in these forums, the Workbook that was recently published felt like it could have been published two years ago. All of that would be well and good if we weren't paying real money for this product. At one point, I was able to get my emails direct to the product team returned, but that is no longer true. So I ask you, other customers, and the product team - is Site.com a truly supported product that is getting development resources, or should we be planning to migrate to another solution outside the Salesforce/Force world? If the solution is not going to advance, we would be better off on a CMS that is actually being developed and supported and tie our Salesforce data in via API.

Hello,

Is there anyway we can provide user friendly URL's in Site.com?

This functionality does exists in Force.com Sites, read:

http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/index_Left.htm#StartTopic=Content/apex_site_urlRewriter.htm?SearchType=Stem

I am looking for similar functionality OOTB with Site.com.

It's a must have feature.

Thanks,

Ketan

[UPDATE 6/6/12: I am editing this post as I get responses from support, as to whether the functions in question truly do not exist, or solutions if they do exist, but in a convoluted or hidden manner.]

[UPDATE 6/7/12: I had a GoToMeeting session with the VP of Site.Com Development and 3 support team members to go through my list. I have updated the list below with the results of that meeting. I have another meeting with them on 6/8/12 to replicate some of the bugs I discovered.]

I am frustrated beyond belief in that none of my support tickets are being replied to, even after 2 business days, there is virtually no documentation for this site.com beta product, and I am hitting serious brick walls with respect to functionality.

If any of you have discovered workarounds to any of these problems, I would greatly appreciate any sage words of wisdom. I can be contacted directly at dharding@illinois.edu

Some of the following are merely annoyances, but some are absolute showstoppers. I’ve bolded items that are critical, i.e., in order to fully port our existing site into site.com, we need to find a workaround.

1. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST BUT IS BEING CONSIDERED FOR FUTURE RELEASE) No versioning, rollback, or undo. Once something is deleted it is gone forever.
   
   
2. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST BUT IS BEING CONSIDERED FOR FUTURE RELEASE) No way to limit people's access to specific pages, let alone certain content blocks on those pages. All contributors and publishers have access to all pages. So if you have contributor access, you can edit all the content blocks on all pages in the site.
   
   
3. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST AND THIS IS BY DESIGN; IS NOT CONSIDERED A PROBLEM) Site.com does not have any check-in/check-out mechanism for content that is being edited. It does not check to see whether another user has a page or content block open for editing. It blithely allows multiple people to have the same content open simultaneously and the last one closed overwrites the others. This is going to make distributing the site content editorial responsibilities more dangerous than if this were a real CMS.
   
   
4. (CONFIRMED BY SUPPORT ON 6/5/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST) There does not appear to be any way to copy a page or template from one “site” to another. So if I clone the site in order to do major overhauls or unpublished development (because I don’t want to screw up the existing site) and I get a page or pages the way I want them, there is no way to port those pages back into the original site.
   
   
5. (CONFIRMED BY SUPPORT ON 6/5/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST) There does not appear to be a way to archive, save, or export a single page or resource. You can only export an entire site en masse. This, combined with #4, means that it is impossible to pull content from an older page or from a different site.
   
   
6. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: FUNCTIONALITY DOES NOT EXIST BUT IS DEFINITELY BEING DEVELOPED. FOR NOW I WILL HAVE TO HARDCODE ALL OF THE MENUS AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE THE SITE MAP TO REARRANGE PAGES WITHIN THE MENU) The navigation menu object appears to only support physical pages. There is no  provision to allow for menu items that are any of the following:
   
   1. A link to an external site
   2. An anchor link on a page, e.g., the submenu items being links to sections within the same physical page
   3. A menu item that is not a link, but rather an organizing “container” for more elements.
   This means either changing our entire menu structure to remove any elements that are not pages, or forgoing the built-in menu object and hardcoding the menus, which completely defeats the point of having a CMS and being able to move pages around on the fly.
   
   
7. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: DEFINITELY A SITE.COM BUG, BUT COULD OBTAIN NO INFORMATION ON WHAT "USE OTHER MAP" MEANS) The default Menu Source for the menu object is “Use Site Map”. There is another option called “Use Other Map”, but there is nothing in any documentation that explains what that option means. Moreover, selecting that option immediately generates a system error telling you to file a support ticket. (unimplemented feature perhaps?)
   
   
8. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING) Many objects display correctly in Site.com ONLY if they are created natively within the WYSIWYG environment. If you import them as HTML code, depending on the complexity of the object, all you get is a block of whitespace with a border. If you preview the page, it looks correct to the end user, but you have no way of using WYSIWYG tools to tweak it. You have to manually edit the HTML and CSS code.
   
   
9. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING) Positioning and sizing within the WYSIWYG editor is seriously off at times. What you ultimately see published is not what you see within the CMS.
   
   
10. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING; I WAS TOLD THAT SITE.COM SHOULD NEVER BE ALTERING CUSTOMER-SUPPLIED CSS; I TOLD THEM IT ISN'T EVEN CLOSE) Stylesheet importing: sometimes, if Site.Com encounters a tag that it does not understand, e.g., the “filter” CSS tag, it omits it along with any CSS after it for that element, even if the subsequent CSS is valid. This means manually checking CSS to make sure things are not dropped. This also precludes importing a fresh version of the stylesheet.
    
    
11. (SEE #10) Site.com re-renders CSS when you save, changing the syntax of some markup, regardless of how you have the markup specified. Site.com has taken the Microsoft “we’ll redo it for you” approach.
    
    
12. (CONFIRMED IN GOTOMEETING ON 6/7/12: SITE.COM BUG. NEEDS FURTHER DEBUGGING) When you duplicate a template that has child templates, it ONLY duplicates the parent, not the children. And since templates cannot be copied from one parent template into another, you are forced to manually recreate those child templates by hand.
    
    

To be blunt: for 5 figures a year, the current incarnation of site.com is is woefully and pitifully inadequate.

Hi there,

In site.com . . . I want to limit the number of child items that show in a menu on my page. For example, I have a vertical menu on the left side of my pages, and I only want it to show the parent and 1 level of child items. I see a link to a "Use Other Map" in the Menu Source drop down but it crashes everytime I try it?

Is there another way to limit what the menu displays? 

Thanks,

-AJ