Automating Alchemy Plugin Uploads in Visual Studio

Anyone building a plugin for Alchemy4Tridion is familiar with the repeated steps of:  Building the project, alt-tabbing to the CME Alchemy page, uninstalling the plugin, alt tabbing to your build directory, moving your hand to the mouse, dragging the *.a4t to the plugin window, yaawwwwnnn, ctrl-tabbing to the CME Content Explorer, F5ing the content. After the billionth time of doing this you yearn for something quicker!

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Alchemy Front End Development Tip

alchemyRecently I’ve been spending all my spare time working on a plugin for the Alchemy Webstore. My plugin needs a popup page to display some information and controls, so I’ve added a simple aspx page, along with a css and js file to give it a little bit of pizazz. Unfortunately for me, I have a very iterative approach to front end development, constantly tweaking my html and css as I get my page looking how I picture it, which with Alchemy means rebuilding my plugin and reinstalling it over and over again. Or does it? Continue reading

Exploring ‘Schedule Publish Phases Separately’ Pt. II

Last week I highlighted a sometimes overlooked Tridion feature, the “Schedule Publish Phases Separately” option in the publishing dialogue. In my post I mentioned that one issue I’d noticed with this feature was what happens when the rendering phase of publishing is successful but deployment fails. In situations like this you’re at risk of losing a lot of rendering, and if you were under a time constraint this can be a pretty big inconvenience. However, with some forethought and just a little creativity, you can recover and take advantage of all the rendering you’ve done.
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SDL Web Design Pattern: “Slicing”

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

Schemas out of sync between environments? Panic!

Content Porter got you down, friend? You’ve got components from a lower environment that need to be migrated to a staging or production environment, but the schema they’re based on has changes that aren’t ready for prime time yet. It’s 1 am, and if you don’t get this solved by the start of business the sky will fall. Panic! Don’t panic. This has a very simple solution.

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Who’s got that bugger checked out?

So that latest update of Chrome has broken some of the Tridion GUI :( … one consequence of this has been that a number of users have been checking out Components and not quite realizing.

Whilst checking who had a some of the items check-out I realised that one of my colleagues was giving out the wrong person – in disbelief, astonishment and sheer anger I had them show me just how they were retrieving the information… and it turned out to be a perfectly easy mistak.

So, this colleague… he was using a method that I suspect a lot of people do and thus thought I’d write this wee observation. On checking the History of the Component you’re presented with a list of … well a list of stuff.

list of stuff about Component history

As you can see Item [2] would appear to be showing me just who has this bugger checked out… but does it?

On closer observation I see that the last two versions [1] are the same – meaning a minor version hasn’t been added (i.e. the person with this checked out has just checked it out … that’s it… checked out and gone home / on holiday / another place of employment - how rude).

Now note item [3] … this shows me the person that really has this checked-out. And you can see that the user ID x43 is not the same as Damian’s x77 as [2] lead us to rashly believe! It seems that the ‘user’ is actually ‘last user to save this item’ whilst the comment is the important one!

Is there an easier way…

You betchya… open the offending Component and look at the ‘Info’ tab. Here we can see the item is locked as it’s checked out and Tridion is telling us which user this is [1].

Straight-up Component info

There’s no confusion here and I was probably in the Component anyway – additionally I can copy the username form here to enter directly into the email system…

Regards the user IDs … Tridion isn’t obfuscating the user for some crazy-ass security reason but this is the info it gets from the client systems – I can live with this and more importantly I can easily hunt down and get the person to check the item back in (or undo-checkout).

 

Pushing the limits on Template Builder’s estimates

­­­Lately I’ve been working with a client using Tridion in an interesting way. This client manages websites for hundreds of customers, each site being virtually identical. Of course, information such as the customer name, contact info and store hours, along with dozens of other bits has to be customized for each site. One of the ways they manage this unique information led me to a useful discovery on how Template Builder handles large packages. Hopefully by sharing here I can save someone else going on the same wild goose chase I did. Continue reading