“Inheriting” Metadata on Organizational Items

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

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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Complex is not difficult, just like simple is not always easy

Complex numberThe word complex in English means the exact same thing as it does in Dutch, although the Dutch dictionary simply puts it as: “compound, complicated” where in the English dictionary I at least find “composed of many interconnected parts” as a first description and the words complicated and hard to understand are following much later.

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Extending Linking for .NET

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

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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