Category Archives: Tridion news

So you committed the SDL Tridion proposal on Area 51. Now what?

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A lot of people have been jumping on the commitment band wagon for the recently proposed Q & A site for Tridion on Stack Exchange’s Area 51 site. This is a great step toward the proposal making it to the beta phase. Thanks to all of you who have got involved so far.

For those who don’t know, Stack Exchange is the creator of some generic technical Q & A sites such as Stack Overflow, Super User and Server Fault. They also make their platform available to more focused communities for products like Drupal and Word Press, as well as completely non-technical sites on various topics as far reaching as gardening, literature and poker. These sites are built by the online communities that want them. Before Stack Exchange sanctions the use of their platform, they want to be sure the sites will get used, and are filled with good content backed by an active community of knowledgeable contributors. They do this by allowing anyone to propose a site on their staging area called Area 51, and measuring its progress as it moves through various phases from initial definition, through commitment and beta until the site becomes live. Continue reading →

SiteEdit 2012 Overview

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I have been very fortunate this week to have had the opportunity to attend the Site Edit 2012 bootcamp at SDL’s offices in NYC. It was a hands-on 2 day workshop where each of us was given an Amazon instance with Tridion and SiteEdit installed. Our goal was to get our hands dirty and solve a wide variety of challenges (including going through the install). Thank you Nuno for making it a great success!

Site Edit 2012, now officially renamed to “SDL Tridion User Interface 2012″, is a very impressive tool. It seems to load into editing mode much faster than its predecessor (at least on the Amazon instance I was playing with), and usability and options available from the toolbar are incredible.  The user experience that can be achieved is mind-blasting!

Here are some rough notes that I took on the new features.  I realize you, the reader, may not have the full context around some of the notes – nevertheless, I think these should  generate some excitement:

  • SiteEdit is now called Tridion UI 2012
  • Not yet ready to go, but if a customer is ready to use it, then they need to talk to SDL on a case-by-case basis.
  • Controlled release. Only a few customers going to implement.
  • The pages are now previewed in an iFrame within the CM interface
  • “Update Preview” 
    • Doesn’t publish in session. Renders the result in the CM and pushes it via web service call.
    • Avoids the publishing queue bottlenecks.
    • i.e. Re-rendering is done “on the fly” rather than the queue
  • “Finish Editing” button commits and publishes
  • In SiteEdit there are no more page templates. They are now called Page Types, which are like a pre-configured page with a template and other defaults. – hole notha level!
  • Functionality is provided to allow previewing the Page Type (just a url to a simple preview page)
  • A page template, associated to a page type can have a custom icon in the ribbon toolbar. This is a great feature to give content editors a better experience
  • Content Types are component templates linked to a page template
  • In Publication settings where you define the Content Types you can specify which folder components get created in via SiteEdit.
    • Can also specify how content is named: user defined or auto-generated (based on a pattern).
  • One ribbon in the toolbar shows all the page templates. Functionality exists allowing to change icons for each template.
  • Ambient Data Framework allows to virtually specify a different environment, e.g. Show how something would display in IE, even though you’re using Chrome; or chane the OS type, etc.
  • Can set blueprint context for pages (e.g. New pages are created and edited in Pub A while content is created/edited in Pub B).

There is another interesting feature called Session Footprint that is designed to help with previewing and testing your page as if the session was created under different environments and conditions.  You can select to show the page as if it ran in a different browser and a different OS, change the session timeout values, pull up specific dynamic component presentations based on search criteria and more.  The Footprint is engineered based on SDL’s Ambient Data Framework, and the whole thing is quite remarkable.

Another cool concept that is provided is called Regions.

  • Allow specifying limits on what kind of component presentations can be dropped in.  For example: only allow dropping components based on a given schema or a component template, or limit the number of components that can be added to a region.
  • This is done by addingsyntax in the design template, just like the regions for SmartTarget.

Last but not least, I’d like to share a very high-level technical architecture of this tool.

Site Edit Architecture

To conclude I’d like to say that the R&D folks have done an outstanding job with this tool and I can’t wait to start developing with this new product!

Welcome back SDL Tridion Workflow

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Over the last two weeks, I have had the privilege of spending a lot of time with some of the R&D folks at SDL who are working on the forth coming releases of their world beating WCM platform SDL Tridion. At both SDL Innovate 2012 and SDL Tridion HQ in Amsterdam this week, there has been a lot of talk about “bundles”. Now I can’t really tell you anything about bundles per se (because I really don’t know the details), but from what I hear “it will be the revolution of SDL Tridion Workflow” which has been the thorn in many a consultant and customer’s side since R4. The biggest feature of the new workflow offering will be grouping items together into “Bundles”, allowing you to process complete work packages through a workflow process instead of just a single Page or Component. Continue reading →

SDL Tridion Event System Newbie Perspective

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SDL Tridion Principal Consultant, Mihai Cadariu outlined a use case for capturing user time stamp information and provided insight into approaches as well as sample code. I was able to replicate his setup and make my first (copy of someone else’s) event system. This type of setup might be old for you, but what impressed me compared to my R5.3 days was how easy it was to Google parts I wasn’t sure on.

Continue reading →

Whitespace in SDL Tridion SP1 XML

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Before reading this, and getting too alarmed, this blog of caution really only applies to those who use XSLT templates (either using the XSLT Mediator or traditional XSLT Component Templates). Although it may have a wider impact that I am not aware of.

I just upgraded a client implementation to 2011 SP1, and mysteriously some of my components were failing to publish. At first this seemed to be a template issue, but on further inspection it became apparent that components that had been made before the SP1 upgrade were fine, and those create or edited after the upgrade were failing.

In one of our XSLT Template Building Blocks, we essentially copy the XML of the Component in order to make all the data available to the presentation code. In addition to copying the nodes, we also add some additional attributes.

<image>
    <image xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tcm:0-114344" xlink:title="ross" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
</image>

Gets transformed by our template to

<image Orientation="portrait" Photographer="- Not applicable" Illustrator="">
    <caption>Some Caption</caption>
    <image type="pub148w" height="148" width="60" src="tcm:417-117248" uri="tcm:417-117248" /
    <image type="pubArticleFull" height="480" width="640" src="tcm:417-117248" uri="tcm:417-117248"/>
</image>

This was working perfectly from version 5.3 up until 2011 GA. However we discover that the XML of components saved using SDL Tridion 2011 had changed

GA XML

<image><image xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tcm:0-114344" xlink:title="ross" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" /></image>

SP1 XML
<image>       <image xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="tcm:0-114344" xlink:title="ross" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" />       </image>

The additional whitespace was being added to the image node by my XSLT template, and it was preventing me from adding the Orientation, Photographer and Illustrator attributes to the element (you can not add attributes with XSLT to a node after adding text, whitespace or nodes)

To get around this I have added <xsl:strip-space elements=”*”/> to the top of my XSLT which fixes our problem, but it does mean we now need to validate the output of all our templates to make sure we are not stripping out any whitespace that we actually need.

Lesson of the day: Never write an XSLT thinking whitespace is irrelevant.

You decide whether you think this is a bug or not, but in the meantime, I hope this post might help you debug any XML related woes you stumble upon after upgrading to SP1.

Fixing GUI issues after upgrading to SDL Tridion 2011 SP1

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I have just finished upgrading a client’s SDL Tridion 2011 GA instance to SP1, and on the whole the experience was fairly painless with the exception of my post on publishing permissions and some minor issues with the Content Manager Explorer (CME).

I believe my client was one of the earlier adopters of SDL Tridion 2011 GA, and we applied a number of early hotfixes to the GA instances. My guess is that we may have installed some “unapproved” hot fixes which we not versioned correctly or that in a debugging effort I accidentally saved some files whilst hunting for a problem.

This appears to be the root of the latest problems we have seen. In an effort to not mess up any customized code or configurations, the SP1 installer does not update any files with unknown versions. In our case this meant that several files were not updated, and the CME was not functioning correctly (several items were not loading or saving, and various JS errors were appearing) even though the installer appeared to have completed successfully.

Continue reading →

See you on Stack Exchange!

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Stack Exchange, a spin-off of the popular Stack Overflow programming Q&A site has an “Area 51″ staging site, where Dave Houlker recently proposed a new site Q&A for SDL Tridion.

You can move the potential site into a beta phase by committing. Just follow this image link.
Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Tridion
Full disclosure: I get credit if you click the nice image. Join via a non-referring link if you prefer.

Continue reading →

The story of SDL Tridion 2011 Custom Resolver and the allowWriteOperationsInTemplates attribute

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Before I start with this blog, let me thank all those who have helped me find my way whilst stumbling around in the forest on this one, you know who you are. Had I read the release note properly over a year ago, I am sure I would never have made this journey, however I have learned a lot and figured I would share what I found.

A long, long time ago, in an office somewhere in the Netherlands I decided to make a VBScript Component Template for Tridion R5.0 which created the HTML for an article, and then published a summary DCP (Dynamic Component Presentation) for inclusion in a broker driven index page. I was a happy man.

Sometime later, I was at a client in Norway, and I only had rights to make templates and pages etc. My client needed me to create a new user in the CMS. The Tridion Administrator was on vacation, so I made a template that created a new user in the system. Again, I was a happy man. Continue reading →

Creating translatable website labels in SDL Tridion

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What’s a ‘translatable label’?

A translation label is typically a short descriptive piece of text that is used in multiple places within a website (often every single page), for example ‘Print’, ‘Back’ and ‘Send to friend’.  In the image below I’ve highlighted (in red) some text labels found in the header of an example website.

If you’re using SDL Tridion to create multi-language websites, these labels need to be available to content editors to add their own translations.

Continue reading →