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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TransportPackageHandler: Does this count as documentation?

I was recently working on an implementation which required a custom Deployer Module to publish and un-publish DCPs from a third party system. In order to store and retrieve data in/from the system, certain ‘non-display’ data is required by the Deployer (think configurable username, passwords, and primary keys for the databases etc.).

Publishing actions were very straight forward, as all of the ‘non-display’ data could be stored in the contents of the DCP and parsed out before storing it. There are even more elegant ways of adding Metadata to Publish Instructions. Unfortunately this is not the case for a un-publish action. The only information sent in the package when un-publishing a DCP is an instruction to remove the specific DCP (or DCPs).

Having never faced this challenge before, I posted the question on tridion.stackexchange.com  and received a suggestion from Eric Huiza regarding an un-documented extension point for the transport package called a TransportPackageHandler. I will leave it to you to decide if it is a great suggestion or not. Continue reading

TcmTemplateSync: Work with TBBs outside of Tridion:

Working with TBBs outside Tridion? Nothing new there you say – I already edit my DWTs in Dreamweaver and my .NET TBBs in Visual Studio. But what about those other commonly used TBB types; Razor and XSLT, what if you don’t like Dreamweaver (or don’t have a license)? Now there is a tool to help you sync local copies of TBBs with the CMS, and break free from editing them in the CMS GUI: TcmTemplateSync Continue reading

Configuring the Tridion Cache Channel Service with WebSphere Application Server JMS

In enterprise environments there is a high chance of having your SDL Tridion Content Delivery side being hosted on an IBM WebSphere Application Server infrustructure.  Setting up the Tridion Cache Channel Service should be done via the Java Messaging Service at places where such infrastructure exists: the client invested a lot into it probably for a good reason and failover is most likely a key requirement.  In this article we’ll take a look at how to set up the Tridion Cache Channel Service using JMS on IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS).

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The Community XSLT Mediator vs. SDL Tridion 2013 XSLT Template Building Blocks

A brief history of the XSLT Mediator for SDL Tridion
Back in 2007/08, Tridion introduced a modular template framework called Compound Templates with R5.3. At the time you could use a combination of Template Building Blocks written in Dreamweaver (DWTs), C# Fragments and .NET assemblies to manipulate items in a package and add them to the output of your Compound Template.

This was a giant leap forward from what are now called legacy templates (VBScript, JScript and classic XSLT Component Templates) in SDL Tridion 2013. The concept of Compound Templates remains strong today, and is the primary way that developers render their content.

One of the key features of the template framework, was that it could be extended to support additional programming languages through the creation of Mediators. Over the years as developers got frustrated with the out-of-the-box mediators (C# Fragments, DWT and .NET assemblies), a number of community built Mediators have reared their heads, including ones for XSLT, Razor and Java. Continue reading

Decommission a Publication Target

Decommission a Publication TargetWith the release of SDL Tridion 2013 SP1, we get a lot of new functionality. One of the interesting features I found was the ability to decommission a Publication Target. This feature is added to the Core Service, and currently not directly available from the UI. Which sounded like a good exercise to make a UI extension, with which you can call this new method.

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It is not too late…

MVP award logoDecember is the time to look back, and if you have been doing a sprint of 365 days, now is the time to start to think about the retrospective. That is exactly what the MVP Selection Panel is doing right now. To select the new MVP’s for the SDL Tridion MVP Award program, we need to evaluate each nominee’s voluntary contribution to the SDL Tridion community over the past 12 months. Which is why I would like to mention, it is not too late.

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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

Publishing Performance of DCPs

Does publishing a Component linked to many Dynamic Component Templates lead to publishing performance issues?

I recently ran into a scenario where, due to an update to business requirements, I had to change Component Templates from statically embedded to dynamic.  In my case there were 14 different CTs linked to the same Schema.  This means that when 1 Component is published there are 14 Component Presentations being rendered and sent to the Broker.  The question then arose, does this kind of a design lead to publishing performance issues?

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