The Item Xml Display Tridion GUI Extension

Continuing my recent trend of Tridion GUI extensions,

• Using jQuery for Tridion GUI Extensions.
• Integrating Tridion with Gravatar.
• The Read-Only Fields Tridion GUI Extension.

I give you the “Item XML Display” extension:

The Read-Only Fields Tridion GUI Extension

A much requested feature we at Tridion have always heard customers asking for is to be able to make component fields disabled for the end user when they are entering content.

This could be due to several reasons, one example could be that the content shouldn’t be manually typed into the field but rather be chosen from a 3rd party source (like a CRM database), for this a custom URL can be used.
A custom URL window is a neat feature in Tridion allowing the developers of the solution to build an external form/app/html page that will help the editors enter the right information into a field.

You can also think of a scenario where fields will become disabled or enabled based on the content being entered into other fields, giving the component edit form a more wizard-like feel.

The extension I created doesn’t have any such specific business logic but it does give a good basis to achieve it if needed.

The extension itself covers all types of fields; text, rich text, numeric, date, links and embedded.

Word of advice – Check your Twitter Connections

Yesterday I posted on a Twitter about a little known Twitter settings page I think everyone using the service should be aware of.

Hopefully, more people will read this post than that ephemeral tweet because there is a security/privacy issue at hand here.

Integrating Tridion with Gravatar

Lately I’ve worked on a Gravatar library for .NET which I released in July. I have also recently had the chance to work on Tridion GUI extensions for a customer.

This got me thinking; wouldn’t it be cool to integrate the two? Almost immediately I thought; yes, it will be cool!

So I’ve set to work on a nice GUI extension that will bring Gravatar to Tridion users and give the GUI a bit of a social touch make it feel more personalized by displaying a personalized photo for each user.

And so the integration is really 3 different extensions that can be each used individually or together.

Current User Photo

The first integration shows the Gravatar photo for the current user logged on to the Content Manager Explorer:

Using jQuery for Tridion GUI Extensions

A relatively unknown feature of the Tridion CMS product is the GUI extensibility framework.

This is actually a fantastic feature which allows us to create and supplement the user interface with just about any type of addition we can think of.

It is pretty unknown because of the lack of documentation but with a little bit of investigation work it is possible to find all sorts of treasures we can use to extend the current GUI.

Here’s one example that is already available on the SDLTridionWorld website’s Community eXtensions section: “Republish from publish queue”, this nifty extension gives users the ability to republish items directly from the queue instead of the normal way of locating the item within the folder or structuregroup hierarchy.

The extension framework is quite robust (not without limitations of course) and allows us to add toolbar items, context menu options, tree nodes or simply run scripts that can do just about anything.

In this article I’m focusing on the latter, adding a scripted extension to do different tasks.

If you’ve done any kind of javascript development you know how difficult and complex it can get, that’s where jQuery comes in, jQuery being a javascript library created to ease the development of client side code.

jQuery’s CSS selectors and methods for DOM manipulation are exactly the tools to help us create Tridion GUI extensions quickly and with relative ease.

The way the extension framework is built allows us to create a jQuery extension that can be reused by other extensions.

Creating a Gravatar client with jQuery and WCF

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I announced the release of the first .NET implementation of the Gravatar API.

Gravatar.NET is available for download on Codeplex.

What I’d like to show in this article is how to make use of the library using jQuery and WCF to create your own Gravatar client (Ponderi.com style).

This article will demonstrate how to show a user their Gravatar account images, allow the user to activate a different image or delete it.

I will build upon many of the concepts I described in an earlier article I wrote called: “Creating a Webservice Proxy with jQuery”. So if you like, check it out first as I won’t go into the basics in this article.