Category Archives: Helpful Tridion tips

“Inheriting” Metadata on Organizational Items

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Recently I had a customer ask me for a rather simple feature – the ability to have Tridion folders and structure groups inherit the metadata schema and values from their parent. This would be only when creating new organizational items and obviously we want to show these default values on screen when editing.

Having spent the past few months completely buried in Anguilla/CME extensions, I obviously started thinking of implementing this by extending a whole bunch of Anguilla Commands and going all crazy on Javascript.

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Making an HTML Design play nice with Tridion

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Clean SheetI am sure we have all had it – that feeling of excitement of a crisp blank piece of paper and a set of freshly sharpened coloured pencils. You are about to start implementing Tridion templates for a greenfield website implementation. No legacy VBScript scribbles already on your canvas to worry about, your favourite .NET TBBs and Custom Functions at hand to boost productivity. You will be knocking out Component and Page Templates by the hour and feel the buzz of seeing that sexy new site start to form on staging before the end of the day! Then you check the source of the html files in the zip provided by the design agency and your heart starts to sink…

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Extending Linking for .NET

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I was recently asked by a customer how they could pass some additional information to dynamic links (in this case, adding query string parameters to resolved component links). Easy I said, just extend the Tridion.ContentDelivery.Web.UI.ComponentLink web control, add a property for the parameters, and ensure this is added to the resolved link URL. I had in fact recommended this approach several times before, however I never actually implemented it myself. It was not quite as straightforward as I had expected, so this post shows you some code to get this done if you face a similar requirement.

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Using Context Variables as a Templating Cache

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Nickoli previously wrote a post introducing Context Variables, with nice Custom Functions to get and set them from your Dreamweaver Templates.  This post discusses the scope of Context Variables, and how that leads to other useful applications like caching.

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SDL Tridion UI – Template Building Block set up for easier content porting

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If you’re following the SDL Tridion guidelines for implementing the new UI within your compound page templates (Link – Note log-in required) you’ll notice that you need to specify the URL of your CME enviroment.  As this value is required on each page template that will utilize UI functionality, this could be a bit of a pain to manage once you migrate your templates between different environments (Development, QA, Production etc).  It doesn’t need to be, here is a simple solution to make content porting and migration easier to work with.

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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 →

The schemas are the easy bit… right?

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After you have been developing with SDL Tridion for a while, its easy to be a bit blasé about Schemas. Thats the easy bit right? Bung a few fields in, mandatory or not? multi-value? Configure the RTF fields a bit and off we go… on to the tricky parts: templates, integrations with 3rd party systems, automation etc. etc.

Making a schema is so simple that it is easy to forget how complex good schema design is. In this article I hope to bring a reminder to implementors of all levels of ability just what makes good schema design. 

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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 →