Responsive Images – an approach using SDL Mobile

resized imagesI have been busy for the last few months working on a new SDL Web ‘product’ – the Tridion Standard Implementation, which is an out-of-the box Tridion CMS and web application framework to learn from/build on top of. One of the things we are focusing on is having a single site to serve all devices with optimizations driven by SDL Mobile. Part of this is ensuring that we are smart about serving images to a device, while still making life easy for editors and (MVC) view developers. There turned out to be quite a lot of factors to consider, but I think we came up with a pretty good solution. Continue reading

Using SmartTarget 2011 with the SDL Tridion 2013 SP1

smart target logoThe latest version of SDL Tridion (2013 SP1) is built to work with the latest version of SDL SmartTarget 2014.  2014 does away with the Business Manager interface as it’s now integrated with the CME, so whilst it’s hard to believe anyone wouldn’t wish to upgrade, if there’s some reason you simply cannot and still need to use ST 2011 with Tridion 2013 SP1, here’s how.

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Context Engine Webinar Resources

teamwork Today I gave an overview of the SDL Tridion Context Engine and how it can be used to provide device detection functionality for SDL Tridion Websites, with a focus on how simple it is to install and use in a RESS / Responsive website.

In the event you missed this presentation, the slides are available after the jump.

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Forms without Java, XSLT or even XML

Forms Now you might have heard that I love WebForms and advocate it everywhere I can (which isn’t necessarily true, but let’s say it is for the sake of argument). So why, you may ask, is Bart writing a provider to an online forms solution?

The answer is really quite simple – well that’s what product management said about the idea; because we recognise that our users are using many different tools to enable and facilitate their diverse content management needs and one of these is the ability to create simple online forms. That is why we built the ECL framework and why we continue to look for ways to improve our customer’s content management experience. Actually, the answer is even simpler than that: just because I can, and because I just love ECL and by now I love it more than WebForms.

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Content Delivery Multi-Value Custom-Meta Querying

vennDiagramIntroduction

I was recently working on a Content Delivery syndication piece for a client so that they could pull various components of varying schema’s based on a variety of metadata values. The client requested that they be able to pass in a list of metadata keys, with each key having an accompanying list of meta-values to be searched on. Continue reading

Tridion Language Switcher

language-switcherSDL Tridion is known for its superior capabilities when it comes to managing multi-lingual websites, and such websites typically have a some kind of a switch to allow switching between languages.  In this article I’ll attempt to explain the concept of setting the Publication Context and how to use Tridion’s Dynamic Linking to allow us not only switch from a site in one language to another, but to do it for any given page on the site.

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OData – How to Query Multiple Custom Metas

On a recent implementation, a large site fully driven by OData, we ran into a scenario where we wanted to retrieve DCPs based on multiple custom metadata values. We quickly realized that there are some limitations around this. For instance: a component with the following custom meta fields, color and shape, having values ‘blue’ and ‘round’ respectively cannot be retrieved in one OData call. This is because each CustomMetas Key/Value is exposed as a separate entry in the CustomMetas collection, and the OData protocol is limited – doesn’t allow querying across properties of multiple entries (not as an AND at least). However, if there is a will there is a way, and in the article I will show an approach to doing so.

Contents:

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