On this year’s (2015) MVP retreat I played with the Alchemy 4 Tridion (A4T) REST API installed on the Tridion Content Manager. The result is a PowerShell script to install an Alchemy plugin in the Tridion Content Manager without having to do anything in the CME GUI.
So I wanted to make a really simple Alchemy plugin to test out the amazing new SDL Web plugin store that my colleagues have been working on this year.  It’s a simple plugin where I inject a little bit of javascript into the publish dialog to permanently check the ‘Abort Publishing’ check-box button, but it’s a great learning experiment plus its a nice example if you’re looking to write a plugin that simply adds a bit of javascript or css etc.
As a Tridion an SDL Web developer, you’ve very likely converted a single block of HTML design into appropriate Tridion Building Blocks. The idea of breaking a page into types of content, represented in Tridion as Component Presentations, is not new to you. But have you “sliced” a Component by sets of fields?
A few months back, Damian Jewett, explored the idea of multiple Template Layout Building blocks. I’m following up with a potential use case for this approach along with a parallel idea with Component Templates instead. We can call this slicing, where we have a consistently used subset of fields out of a collection of Component fields.*
*I first heard the term “slice,” in a slightly different context, from a French design agency after they learned how Tridion worked.
First read Damian’s post. Continue reading
I’m sure this is well documented somewhere, but I couldn’t for the life of me find it, so I thought I’d try to save someone some time and frustration.
Most people have probably used a WebDav URL to reference a Tridion object sometime in the course of their development. WebDav URLs are usually of the format:
/webdav/030C Account Center Content/Building Blocks/Content Continue reading
To be honest I had been a bit lazy. In all the conversations I had had on the subject of editing AJAX loaded content with Experience Manager I had been told it could not be done, so I didn’t even try. Until Jaime told me it was possible and I found out that its not even difficult. Continue reading
This post briefly introduces some tools for getting accurate estimates of running times for publishing pages when optimizing templates. There are certainly better ways to measure page publishing time than with a stopwatch!
In this post, we explore reusability of Dreamweaver and Razor Templates, as well as how to break up a single DWT or Razor design into multiple design building blocks, within the same template.
My current project has the ambition to use almost every aspect of the SDL Web suite of products, from plain old Tridion through Audience Manager, SDL Mobile, SmartTarget and finally Campaign Manager – and of course all working via Experience Manager, to provide inline editing and contextual preview.
When looking at how these integrate, all roads lead to… The Ambient Data Framework. SDL provides a number of off-the-shelf cartridges which have varying degrees of mystery – this post aims to clear the mist and describe a little bit more than you get from the docs.
The whole idea of the reference implementation was to make your life (the life of a SDL Tridion developer) easier. But sometimes people make mistakes, and then the end result can be slightly more difficult than it was intended to be.
This blog post is not so much a confession of what I did wrong, but more intended to help you see how easy things can be changed when the tool you use was designed to be simple and modular.
After writing my post about having fun with experience manager last year, I think it is time for a small update. This time I’ll keep it short, but we will have even more fun with XPM!