CityDesk is compatible with Vista, but you'll need to do a couple of things to get it working.

QuickWebTool is an add-on to CityDesk that provides the following features:

• Extra fields to store additional article information
• Scripting extensions that facilitate these fields and more
• Fast Site Tree browsing and edit of Articles, Pictures and Files

For more details, visit the QuickWebTool site, http://quickwebtool.otps.nl.

To upgrade to CityDesk 2.0.25:

• Starter Edition Users download from http://download.fogcreek.com/cdstarter/CityDesk_starter_up.exe
• Paid users, log on to the Fog Creek Shop to download the latest version.

If you are still getting crashes closing windows in CityDesk, we have a recommended workaround. Don't forget to reboot!

People often ask how to generate a table in CityDesk. Here is a new approach using Javascript, an approach that lets you generate HTML tables without knowing any HTML.

It is one of the resources on www.citydeskwizards.com, a new CityDesk portal site just launched by Telepark. This site provides a number of resources useful to CityDesk users. There are Javascript Extensions and PHP Modules, which are ready-to-use scripts that provide innovative extensions to CityDesk features, such as the table generator above, and there are Wizards and FAQs and on and on.

Telepark now offers a free CityDesk Wizard named JUUKA. Used together with the free CityDesk Starter Edition, you can easily put together a professional and attractive website containing up to 50 files without knowing any HTML. JUUKA has no time limitations and can be used to create and maintain your own websites. This template comes with a simple one-column layout (e.g. blog-style), automatic navigation menu generation, and article-based configuration.

From GreenWave Solutions, a very useful new add-in for CityDesk: “HTML DBScript can be used to add the results of database queries to your webpages. The queries are added to your pages before you publish them, so there is no need to run anything special on your webserver.”

Year End News
from Joel Spolsky, CEO, Fog Creek Software

As the year draws to a close I'd like to bring you up to date on the latest news from Fog Creek Software.

This has been a terrific year. Monthly sales of software licenses were about 250% higher than the same time last year, allowing us to pay salaries to the company founders (always appreciated), move into shiny new office space, hire new people, and start a summer internship program for college students. At the end of August we shipped a major new version of CityDesk, 2.0.

In the last half of 2003 most of our programming efforts were spent on two major porting projects. CityDesk is being fully internationalized (the first non-English version, German CityDesk, is almost complete). Our other product, FogBugz, is being ported to run on Unix-based servers, which is also almost complete. So even though we're working at full speed, both of these projects don't really help much for our existing customers, which is why it may feel like we're slowing down.

In June I predicted that there would be another major version of CityDesk at the end of 2003. Unfortunately, that prediction turns out to have been, well, wrong. In the three years that Fog Creek has been in existence I have learned that every release takes a certain amount of time, usually three months, for the beta cycle and to stomp bugs. That means that if we did two releases a year, we would spend 6 months writing new code and 6 months in beta. If we do one release a year, we spend 9 months writing new code and 3 months in beta -- fifty percent more new code in the same amount of time. Since CityDesk 2.0 only shipped on August 25th, and we have a beta cycle for German CityDesk in our future, it's just too early for another release. We've got some great new ideas for CityDesk and we'd rather code them up and get them to you as quickly as possible rather than go through yet another beta cycle without them. Some parts of the UI are being rewritten, and I would hate to waste time fixing bugs in old code that we plan to throw out anyway just to get a stable interim release. As usual, we thank you for your patience, and as usual, please don't buy our software if it doesn't already do what you need!

CityDesk has generated an incredible amount of enthusiasm. Everyone tells us it fills an important gap between the overpowered, overpriced "big iron" content management systems for large corporations and simple blogging tools, and we're proud of some of the great sites that were built with CityDesk: sites that highlight your creativity and the fantastic range of interesting voices on the web. I'm even prouder that companies like Telepark and Tintico are creating great new businesses by building better web sites for their customers -- web sites which anyone can update. That's the power of CityDesk and I thank you for your support and enthusiasm and wish you a happy and prosperous new year.

Now online: the CityDesk 2.0 documentation, including the definitive list of what's new in 2.0. If you still haven't seen it, we have two movies (in Flash format) with demos of the latest features. Bring popcorn!

Telepark has release CityDesk Wizards, which allow you to generate a complete, professional website in under 60 minutes. They are using a very innovative ABC method ("Article Based Configuration") so you can configure the design of the website by editing an article.

If you have been using any version of the beta, please upgrade to the 2.0 release candidate. If you have been using 1.0, this is a pretty dang stable release thanks to the beta testers from four prior rounds of beta releases, so you can feel reasonably safe about using it. In a week or two if no major new problems crop up, we'll rerelease this as the Gold version of CityDesk 2.0.

Getting the Release Candidate

A free special edition of CityDesk 2.0 allowing up to 100 files per site will be available exclusively on CD-ROM, as part of the August 14th edition of the German magazine Internet Intern.

In the discussion group, Mark explains how he uses the otherwise underutilized Audiences feature to create draft CityDesk articles and be certain they won't be published until they're ready.

2.0 Gets Closer

Early next week, if all goes well, we'll release what will, hopefully, be the last beta before the final version of 2.0! I'm calling it the “Release Candidate” because if it doesn't have any showstoppers it will be the final version of 2.0.

At this point we're happy to announce that all paid users of CityDesk 1.0, home or professional edition, will receive a free upgrade to CityDesk 2.0 Professional Edition. Yep, you heard me right. Even if you bought CityDesk 1.0 Home Edition, you'll get upgraded to the Professional Edition when 2.0 ships.

Why would we do something nutty like this? Well, I'm forced to admit, it's because the CityDesk Home Edition was a bit of a failure. We wanted to make a cheaper entry-level version of CityDesk, but in the end we made something that was too cheap to support profitably, and which ended up making people worry about article count limits and go to ridiculous lengths to keep their sites under 500 pages. It wasn't fair to sell a crippled version of the product at a price that we simply couldn't maintain, so we're going to stop selling the Home Edition altogether and as a parting gift we'll upgrade every existing Home Edition user onto the Professional Edition.

Many people have been asking for a version of CityDesk that can be given to contributors — novice end-users who simply need to create, edit, and delete articles, but for whom designer mode is overkill. So when 2.0 ships we will introduce a new Contributor Edition. This edition is the same as the Professional Edition minus designer mode. Pricing has not been announced but it will be significantly less than the Professional Edition. You won't want to buy the Contributor Edition alone, because there would be no way to set up a publish location (changing publish locations is a designer mode feature). But if you want to set up a site using your own Professional Edition and give it to your Aunt Ethel to maintain, you can get her the Contributor Edition at a lower cost and eliminate the possibility that she'll discover Designer Mode and mess up all your templates by mistake! More details will follow.

CityDesk beta 2.0.7 is now available for download. (What's New?)

This release includes a lot of new code, especially around the article editor, so it's a little bit riskier than a normal beta. If you install this beta, please have an aggressive backup policy: use the automatic backup feature! If you're using CityDesk 2.0 for production work you may want to wait for the next beta, 2.0.9, which will be likely be more stable than 2.0.7.

That's the first, tiny visible effect of the fact that we've done a bunch of work to make it possible to create standards compliant xhtml sites with CityDesk 2.0. In the discussion group, Joel talks about some of the programming work we've done for the next release of the beta.

Crystal Ball Predictions about CityDesk 2.0. The current version of the beta is the most stable version yet, so we’re going to allow ourselves the luxury of a slightly longer period before the next beta comes out in order to try to improve the HTML source preservation feature (or at least, get it up to the level of quality as the rest of the product.) After that we'll launch a much wider release candidate or two to shake out the last few system configuration issues (those weird bugs that only show up on, say, the Polish version of Windows), and finally go gold after that.

Crystal Ball Predictions about CityDesk 3.0. We don't know what it will do, but it will ship this year. We'll decide how many new features to bite off based on how much time we have to get a new release out in calendar year 2003.

We're getting closer. There's a rather large pile of rather small bugs that still need to be fixed; by "small bug" I mean things that happen very rarely or only affect a small number of people or which are generally harmless, but we're still going to fix them. That will probably take two or three more weeks, after which we'll release our first "release candidate" to a much larger audience.

We do have a couple of blocking problems in the last beta which were keeping people from getting work done, so we've released Beta 2.0.5 today to address them. If the problem relating to extra paragraph tags in one-paragraph fields was driving you nuts, upgrade. If you want to try out thisFolder with nextLink, upgrade. Otherwise wait for 2.0.7.

A quick reminder: beta software is not intended to be production quality or used on important, production websites.

What's new in Beta 2 ?

Active Channels

Gwyn Cole shows us how to create an Internet Explorer Active Channel using Citydesk.

"Simply put, Active Channels allow you to provide an IE menu with your most recent items and articles. It also allows a more controlled offline mode when browsing."

For instructions, please visit Gwyn's blog.

1. If you don't manually change your charset to UTF-8, non-English letters may not appear correctly. Workaround: add this right after your <head> tag: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
2. If you upgrade a 1.0 site, you will have trouble creating new templates.

There are other small bugs, too. The next version of the beta (2.0.3) will fix these and some other bugs and will be available early next week, probably May 13. If you've told us about something via email or via the "Send Feedback" form in the product, don't worry, we know about it. Thanks!

The CityDesk help file itself was created in CityDesk, of course! To see how we did it, download the source here (726KB zip).

The site was built by Terry Kearns (no relation). “He worked with us to set up the CSS and template and handed the site to us for the content. Within a few days we had most of our site published and ready for the public.”

Also check out the Spanish-language manual Tintico created for the site.

This site will now be located at http://citydesknews.com. Bookmark the new location!

The Fog Creek CityDesk crew is interested in hearing some of your feedback about CityDesk News. Do you think this site should contain general news about web design, even if it's not directly related to CityDesk? Or only CityDesk specific news? What would you change about CityDesk news to make it more useful? Let us know on the discussion board! Don't be bashful!

Also check out Herff.com.

Steven den Beste emailed us: “When you look at Blogger sites, or Manila sites, there's usually a striking resemblance, like how siblings usually look like one another. I know it's possible to make Manila look a lot different, but somehow most of them end up looking like Winer clones (gad). What struck me was that there was no evident similarity at all among the CityDesk sites.” Indeed our goal was to create a product that could be used to create any “shape” web site, not just blogs with their reverse-chronological style.

Paul Adams explains how to provide a custom 404 error page that's more useful than the default. Here at Fog Creek, we use CityDesk to generate our 404 error page; there's no reason your 404 page can use CityScript and templates. With some creativity you can do really cool stuff. For example, set a keyword “(404)” on the most popular pages of your site, then use CityScript with the condition (keyword_contains "(404)") so that anybody mistyping a URL at your site gets an index of popular pages.

Carefully crafted titles are far more useful in getting good search engine placement. In CityDesk, if you have a variable named siteName, you can put it in the title of every page by putting

<title>{$.siteName$}</title>

in your template. You can add the headline too, for even more relevance:

<title>{$.headline$} - {$.siteName$}</title>

Terry Kearns has created an excellent example of this kind of end-user CityDesk documentation here.

A tiny Javascript library from Poland called Alladyn lets you create spectacular animation effects in DHTML that look like Flash, but without... Flash! And they work on almost any modern browser using very clever techniques to achieve compatibility. Check out their gallery, you'll be amazed at what's possible.

Not CityDesk, of course! The first release of CityDesk used inscrutible numeric file names like all the big CMSs. But we actually listen to our customers, and fixed this in the very next release.

Joel on Software: “Customers Don't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want.”

You'll find all the color settings are stored as variables which you can change at will.  It also includes an automatically generated navigation bar and blogroll.

NYC Bloggers: “It is far above our poor power to say anything that can encompass the events of that day. But in bringing together bloggers from New York, we thought it fitting to provide a place for us to share our writing from that time.”

The discussion group has a way to print the number of articles matching a condition.

Justin's Links: Should Everything Be a WebLog?

Web Page Design for Designers: “This particular establishment serves the hottest, meanest Bangalore Phal in the known universe. Where other restaurants are content to use chile pepper symbols on their menus to indicate the spiciness of their dishes, this one uses mushroom clouds.”

Mark Bernstein: “Living sites are only as good as today’s update. If the words are dull, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated. If the words aren’t there, people will shake their heads and lament your untimely demise.”

1. including variables in CSS files
2. using different classes of templates which specify the look and feel of different sections in the site
3. a mechanism for including breadcrumbs for easy navigation.

The Mercury News has a review of Sprint PCS Vision. “I'm betting PCS Vision (www.sprintpcs.com) will flop with consumers, at least in its initial form, because the features it offers just aren't compelling enough.”

Of course, we used CityDesk itself!

A single CityDesk file creates three versions of the help system:

• Online Help for the Windows HTML Help Viewer. (Actually CityDesk produces all the input files for Microsoft's HTML Help Compiler)
• An HTML version that lives on our web page
• A Microsoft Word version of the tutorial (using Word's HTML file format option) which we use as input to Adobe Acrobat to produce a printable CityDesk tutorial in PDF format.

That way any changes made to one version automatically appear in all versions. If you're interested in doing the same thing and want to see how we did it, you can download a copy of the CityDesk site we use to generate all our help files (705KB Zip).

What Jakob is really complaining about is that Windows versions of IE do not give the user the ability to change the font size when the designer has specified an exact pixel size using CSS. You can see this here:

This text uses a relative font size

This text uses an absolute pixel size

If you have Internet Explorer on Windows, try zooming in and out (use the View | Text Size command) and you'll see that the top line adjusts while the bottom line does not.

Why do designers specify exact pixel sizes using CSS? Well, because a rather influential web design expert Jeffrey Zeldman argues (in our opinion incorrectly) that there is no choice, and it's really Internet Explorer's fault. He's right, it's Internet Explorer's fault, but since 80% of the visitors to the average site are using IE for Windows, blaming Microsoft is not a good enough reason to torture people who are more comfortable with larger fonts.

CityDesk's font size feature is old-school; it uses the “obsolete” but universal method of setting <FONT> tags with SIZE of 1 through 7, which can be zoomed in and out by users everywhere. Although CSS purists like Zeldman think you should never use retro FONT tags, the truth is they do work everywhere and provide better usability for IE Windows users, which is probably more important to most sites than CSS-political-correctness.

CityDesk is Not a Typewriter

Are you "sick" of 'ugly straight quotes' and -- worst -- double dashes?

When you want your web pages to look “really nice” — for that special occasion — you need to use Unicode entities in your HTML source. And one of the easiest ways to do this is by defining a few CityDesk variables. For example:

For more about these and other special characters see Peter K. Sheerin's article The Trouble With Em ’n EN.

The Fog Creek team fixed some minor, yet potentially painful, bugs in SP2. Upgrading is free.

What's New In Service Pack 2?

For download instructions and to check what version you have, run CityDesk and choose Help >> Check For Updates.

"I hit upon the idea of putting my content fragments into dummy articles. This would give me the ability to edit them in both HTML View and Normal View, and I could include them in other pages with a snippet of CityScript..."