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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Some thoughts on CMS/CDN Integration

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Creating a architecture presentation the other day helped to crystallise some thoughts in my head on integrating a CMS like Tridion, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

I have been involved with such matters before (see my SDL Tridion World Article on how to technically integrate a CDN through Storage Extensions) but I thought it was worth sharing my ideas on the considerations when working with a CMS and CDN.

SDL Tridion’s Enterprise Content Management features are a good match for companies with a truly global digital presence and audience. Such companies are also those most likely to benefit from the scaling features offered by a global Content Delivery Network, so Tridion + CDN is a hot topic.

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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 →

A Custom Resolver in practice

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Back in February I posted an article about Custom Resolvers. Yesterday I rolled my first Custom Resolver into a production environment, so I figured it was time to share my findings.

Background

To set the scene, it probably helps to explain the business requirements first. We have a large implementation with over 300 publications. Many of these share content, some of which needs to be secured, and links to binaries that also need to be secured. We have a third party security solution, which is implemented as a proxy on top of our published site. The proxy looks for a security.xml in the folder of any request, and then prompts for login etc depending what is contained in the XML file. This works very well for pages, but the pages often link to binaries (which were all contained in the “/images” directory for each publication). In order to secure binaries with different sets of restrictions we needed to bind the binaries in different Structure Groups. To simplify the concept, we decided to publish a variant of each binary linked from a page to the same Structure Group as the page. This has the desired effect of securing all binaries that are linked from secured pages with the same restrictions.  When a binary is linked from multiple secured pages, multiple variants of the binary are published. 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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Why we don’t use SDL Tridion Workflow

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The SDL Tridion MVPs were chatting on Skype last week, and the subject of workflow came up. One MVP told us he was working on a particularly interesting workflow challenge, and another shared the fantastic one-liner “Rule #1 for SDL Tridion Workflow: Don’t do it”.

Now based on my last post “Welcome back SDL Tridion Workflow” I thought it would be interesting to take a look at why so few clients implement SDL Tridion’s workflow solution for managing their content. After all, I bet 9 out of 10 clients list workflow as a feature in RFIs when making their WCM selection shortlists. 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!