When building a GUI extension it’s best to only show your functionality when relevant, this behaviour starts with the buttons you add to the Ribbon Toolbar and the Context Menu.
A while back I wrote a post on using Context Variables as a templating cache. When I came across some requirements to cache data between templates on a recent project I revisited this concept, but found some limitations with Context Variables which I had not realized before. As such I ended up implementing a different approach to caching
Recently I was involved in the setup of a new content-delivery environment, migrating from a WebSphere 7.* application server to WebSphere 8.5.5. Right away when we started up the application, we started seeing some content-delivery errors with our session preview web-service which we did not experience on WebSphere 7. I’m going to review the problem, and talk about how it was resolved. Continue reading
If you’ve still not given Alchemy a shot, I’ve created a couple of videos to show how easy it is install (and un-install) the framework within your SDL Tridion / SDL Web Environment.
Oddly enough, yes it can – in a very specific scenario – of course, this can be avoided with clear processes (or even better automation) with the right hotfix (TT88491: Translation Manager revert retrieved translation for target item in “Reserved state”) but it’s good to know as tracking this down was a real bugger!
In this second video, I perform a quick review of the Alchemy Starter Project (SP).  The SP provides a basic hello world project.  It’s recommended to go through the project and rename some items and add your own icons this, this is all covered.
I’m going to be presenting a session at the Tridion Developer Summit next month that walks everyone through the creation of an Alchemy Plugin, so I thought I better get some practice!  I also thought it would be useful to record this practice into a series of mini videos, so here goes with the first video of the series.
We have a number of environments that we work with and we move data from one environment to another using both the generally available and highly customized Release Manager and, of course, the Content Porter. This post is about what we’ve found that works best in this scenario, and helps us to ensure that the release happens as smoothly as possible.
When creating a GUI or an Alchemy Extension, you may end up with a Ribbon tool icon that appears outside of the main ribbon.  This area doesn’t automatically use the 16 x 16 icon, so here’s what you need to do to ensure you’ve covered this one off.
Reading the docs, you would be led to believe that creating Fredhopper triggers was a matter of editing the trigger-types.xml file. It is however also possible to do this programatically – a trick that can come in handy should you not have access to that file on Production, or you wish to manage your triggers through automation.