Posted on Monday, December 28, 2009
Filling the gap of the umbraco.tv series on building custom sections: Find out how to build a multilevel custom tree using the Northwind database.
Posted on Monday, December 07, 2009 in
umbraco,
English,
v4,
api
A small comparison of using the document api versus the nodeFactory class for displaying umbraco data on the front end. Read more about it here.
Posted on Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Did you know you can do parameter chaining on macros? Don't know the concept? Read on!
A client of mine was asking how he had to use the translation features in umbraco. Honestly, I haven't used it before but have started to explore how those features can be used in umbraco. Have a look at this article and let me know your thoughts on the last question.
Posted on Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Wow, just notices how long it took since my last blog post. I'm back, and reason for my delay was an error in my umbraco installation which disabled my blogging platform. Quite of annoying, but it's back up and running.
And whilst I'm here, I might as well share a new umbraco package action I've been working on as part of my spare project 'Protected Media'. It's a package action which allows to inject a complete section into your website's web.config. Read the complete article here .
I'll also share the code to be included in the wonderful Package Actions Contrib project mainly run by Richard. I'll also cross post on the wiki just in case...
Oh, and I might be my last post...
before revamping this site. I got a little bored with the current design... which is basically a Wordpress theme I've slighlty adapted to fit my blogging needs...
Hi all,
It's been a while since last blog post. Guess I must have been busy doing great stuff. And I have. It's been two fantastic month building umbraco sites and add on packages. And that's the reason for this new blog post.
I've been asked too many times now when the 'protected media', which I've demoed at the last Benelux user group meeting, would be packaged up for the community. It still hasn't been :(
And for that reason, I've decided to go open source with this package to let the wonderful umbraco community participate in the design and implementation.
If it's still unclear what protected media is all about, read up this article on this site. If you'd like to contribute to the project, feel free to contact me at dirk@netaddicts.be and I'll be happy to add you to the list of developers.
Be aware though, current code is far from complete and it's been ported from old v3 code (for which it was originally designed)...
I will also continue to work on this and other projects in the future.
Hi all umbracians... Yesterday, I was able to debug some xslt from an umbraco powered website. It turned out not to be as difficult as I though it would have been... Here's what I've done to get xslt debugging working using umbraco's latest nightly build combined with Warren's excellent CWS2 package
Feel free to add some comments, I'm sure other solutions are possible... It would be great to hear about those as well.
I've recently been involved in a small project that required some advanced search functionalities. I've bundled my experiences in a Short article and tips on using search facilities in umbraco using Lucene.net
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 in
umbraco,
English,
v4,
tip
Lots of people are aware of those nifty hidden gems in umbraco. And today I'll introduce another one which I came across a few days ago. It's the 'umbracoUrlAlias' property alias. It can be useful in cases where you'd like to restructure some parts of the umbraco content tree. Let's take an news section example and start from this:
-Content
--News
---2009
----4
-----8
------A news item created on March 8th
Assume your client want to keep the tree structure as is (As it makes it easy for him/her to know when posts have been created/updated, but doesn't want users who visit the site to enter the complete path /news/2009/4/8/a-news-item-created-on-martch-8-th.aspx. Instead, the user should be able to enter /news/a-news-item-created-on-march-8-th.aspx.
In this case, 'umbracoUrlAlias' migth become the programmer's best friend. All you need to do is to have an extra property of type 'textstring', and alias = 'umbracoUrlAlias'. For each of the news item, enter news/name-of-the-item (Replace name-of-the-item with the corresponding new item's node name, NO LEADIND SLASH AND DO NOT ADD THE .ASPX EXTENSION) and the news item will also be available from /news/name-of-the-item.aspx.
Ok, got it?
Let's add another example (a real life example I ran into last week) where I am dealing with profiles (Basically, people that register on the site) and projects (People can add any number of projects). Content tree had to be structured as:
-Content
--Profiles
---Profile-1
---Profile-2
----Projects
-----Project-1
----Other stuff folder
---Profile-3
and so...
In this case, 'Project-1' is available from the address /profiles/profile-2/projects/project-1.aspx whereas the client requested that a project is always available from the address /projects/project-1.aspx.
Solution: Again, add a new property of 'textstring' type, alias = 'umbracoUrlAlias' and enter projects/project-1 in the field (for project-1 that is).
Pretty neat stuff, isn't that?
And it's not finished yet. Assume 'Project-1' has a number of child nodes as in following tree structure:
-Content
--Profiles
---Profile-1
---Profile-2
----Projects
-----Project-1
------Child-1
------Child-2
----Other stuff folder
---Profile-3
Both child nodes will be available from /profiles/profile-2/projects/project-1/child-1.aspx (/profiles/profile-2/projects/project-1/child-2.aspx) as from /projects/project-1/child-1.aspx (/projects/project-1/child-1.aspx) without the need to add the property for those child nodes.
Bottom line: It doesn't matter how deep the content is stored inside umbraco, it can always be retrieved using a much more simple url/path if you're adding a 'umbracoUrlAlias' property.
Happy coding!
UmbracoCast #8 from Niels Hartvig on Vimeo.