Tag: xml

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Programming with the Extensions Manager

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.

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One Extension to Rule them All

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.

Extensions Manager - Full view

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Setting up a Tridion 2011 GUI extension in 8 steps

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.

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My Tridion 2011 CTP Extensions Go GA

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).

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My First Attempt at Tridion 2011 GUI Extensions

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:

xmldisplay-extension-2011-firefox
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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:

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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.

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ASP.NET Custom Sitemap Provider

Contents

Introduction

Quite a while ago I internally blogged about creating a custom Sitemap provider in ASP.NET.  Even though its been a while I believe its still relevant, especially the SQL caching example I added.  Hopefully you can still get something out of it.

With ASP.NET 2: Microsoft introduced a few services which are built on top of the provider model.
Services such as the membership or sitemap rely on providers to supply them with the actual information. All the providers are derived from the ProviderBase class.

The default Sitemap provider is the XmlSiteMapProvider which is used by ASP.NET to retrieve the website’s navigation structure stored in the Web.sitemap file.

The cool thing about this is that we can easily extend these providers if we need different functionality than what Microsoft provides. So As long as we keep inline with the providers’ interfaces the services will work with our own customizations just fine.

A benefit of creating a sitemap provider that reads from a database should be obvious: Its pretty easy to add custom navigation where needed to new or existing sites by reading ready information from our application data store. The information in many cases will already be structured in a hierarchy so its easier to retrieve it for a navigation structure. This allows us to create the main site’s navigation, breadcrumbs, or specific structures for different sections of our site in a pretty easy way to implement, no need to write additional files on to the webserver’s file-system and the caching mechanism shown in this article gives a boost for performance.

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