Life of a geek and a part-time poet
Yoav Niran's Geeky stuff, Poetry, Programming, Futurama and Life…
Again I’ve put some focus on the List Quick Helper which I think is a valuable extension on its on but also is a good platform for further extensibility. Extensibility not necessarily created by myself.
With this update to the helper I’ve included two major additions to functionality.
Ah! its Friday! And what better way to celebrate this day than with a nice GUI extension?
So here is my latest extension available for you to enjoy…
With 2011, the GUI received a new breadcrumb control which is a very useful way to quickly orient yourself of where you are in the system and making it easy to climb up the specific hierarchy you’re currently drilling through.
Of course, those of us who use Tridion know that we usually jump from one location to another, spanning over different publications and sections within publications. For those cases, if we want to go back to a location we were working on before we need to locate it again in the tree, which can be quite a hassle. Especially in large environments.
So my extension will hopefully make it even simpler to work within the GUI in the manner I just specified.
This extension adds 2 new buttons to the GUI right next to the breadcrumb. The buttons mimic the behavior of the browser keeping track of the places(folders, structure-groups, etc.) a user visits.
Back in October of last year I released the List Quick Helper, Tridion 2011 extension, which, in the unlikely case you’ve forgotten, looks like this:
The helper loads within the list view of the main Tridion 2011 GUI and shows additional information about the selected item in the list so there is no need to open a new dialog window just to see the schema being used by a Component or the directory name of a Structure Group just to name a couple of examples.
When I released it the first time I considered it to be a beta as it was a little rushed. Today Im happy to announce that the Helper is all grown up now and at version 1.0, boasting a host of new features and improvements.
Continue reading “The List Quick Helper Tridion extension gets an update”
About a week ago I published my Extensions Manager, a Tridion 2011 extension that allows extensions’ creators define customizations for their users in a few lines of code. The customizations are exposed as fields to the users in a graphical interface that is easy to use and also takes care of the persistence of the values the users enter.
In my previous post I focused on the functional side of the Manager, the different features it has and the visual interaction.
In this post I’d like to focus on the programmatic side – how should an extension creator use it.
Since Tridion 2011 has been released with its shiny new GUI framework everyone and their sister have either been creating or thinking about creating extensions. I myself have been heavily involved in creating some.
Traditionally, extensions for the most part are islands of functionality; code is typically hardly ever reused. This is something I’d like to improve. With the advancement of the Tridion framework and by following OO practices, it’s possible to create reusable code, frameworks and more, the sky it the limit really.
A few weeks ago I thought about customizing GUI extensions. As extensions mature it will make sense to allow Tridion users, whether administrators or business, the ability to make changes to extensions’ behavior, to turn functionalities on and off and more, without having to change the underlying code. This led to… *drumroll* … The Extensions Manager.
The new 2011 Tridion GUI framework is a major overhaul to the way extensions have been previously developed. The framework now is far more robust and well designed. Building new and exciting extensions has never been easier. However, configuring your extension may not be the easiest thing in the world to do…
The following tutorial steps show how to configure an extension for the Tridion 2011 GUI from start to finish.
The example configuration and code is based on my extension: The Item XML Display.
Continue reading “Setting up a Tridion 2011 GUI extension in 8 steps”
While I have been planning to publish many more posts already this year, time seems more slippery than expected and I just can’t find it and hold it down for the necessary amount of… well, time.
So nothing fancy with this post, I just wanted to publish the extensions I created before, for the Tridion 2011 CTP(Item Xml Display and List Quick Helper) with the update to make them work on the already released Tridion 2011 (GA).
With SDL Tridion (R)5.3 and the introduction of Modular/Compound Templates, the way of doing templates as radically changed, no longer we had to use an old and obsolete technology such as VBScript. We could finally use .NET and Visual Studio to write template code as well as introduce “new” technologies such as XSLT with the help of Mediators (see XSLT Mediator).
One of the biggest advantages of this change is the ability to reuse existing code in a structured and clear way. Logic can be placed in dedicated classes, OO concepts can be leveraged for inheritance, encapsulation and more.
This led to the TemplateBase class which I and many others have been using for several years now. Around it I have also grouped additional classes to support reuse of common functionality that can be carried from one implementation project to another. This is known as the Templating Base Project.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Templatebase class and the Templating Base Project I suggest you hurry and get yourself over to SDLTridionWorld.com and download the code now – Template Base Project
For the past few weeks I’ve been working (whenever I could find the time) on a GUI extension for the new 2011 Tridion platform.
Unlike previous extensions I’ve built, this one is much more complex and spans over more functionality than the more specific ones I worked on before.
I call it the “List Quick Helper“. Where the main idea was to create a useful tool to supplement the information exposed by the GUI’s list view. The theme of this extension is to boost productivity by exposing data quickly and providing small tools to get common tasks done faster.
If you’ve worked with the Content Manager Explorer you’re familiar with having to open an item to view its properties, say to tell the schema of a component you have to open the component’s editing form or to know the file name of page, again need to open the edit form. Even on a fast system it takes at least a few seconds to load up the form. For a shared item you need to select one of the options in the modal dialog (open parent, localize or read-only). After several clicks and at least a few seconds (if not more) you finally can find that little piece of information you were seeking.
What if that information was exposed in the list view immediately? Well, now it can be:
About a month ago I happily shared a GUI extension I’ve built for Tridion 2009 called the Item XML Display extension.
This extension lets a user (typically a developer) view the entire XML structure of a Tridion item from within the GUI without the need to open a new IE window or having a remote session to the CM server.
If you’re one of those already using this extension and have been dreading the moment Tridion 2011 will come out and you will be left without being able to quickly view items’ XML, fear not! I got you covered:
Continue reading “My First Attempt at Tridion 2011 GUI Extensions”
Life of a geek and a part-time poet 