About Bart

Bart Koopman is a Community Development Consultant with SDL CMT (Content Management Technologies) division and has worked for the company since 2003. In his current role at the Product Management department, he is the evangelist of all SDL Tridion products. In the past, Bart worked as a trainer and consultant in the Professional Services department and before that he was a SDL Tridion Technical Support engineer. Currently he is responsible for the SDL Tridion World website and the SDL Tridion community.

Having fun with Experience Manager, Page Regions and Widgets

I have been working on a demo image for a workshop I had to give about 2013 and Experience Manager. To make it a true educational example, I didn’t just reuse bits of existing implementations, but basically redesigned most from scratch. Keeping an eye on simplicity to make it all easy to explain and thus simple to understand, while still following the best practices. For most this was still quite straight forward, but when crossing the topic of Experience Manager I actually came to a few new insights which I thought where worth sharing.

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Managing product information in SDL Tridion

Product information presentationManaging product information in your CMS is always a big topic for discussion. Typically a CMS is not suited for managing product data like price and stock, on the other hand not every PIM system has the ability to manage multilingual descriptions of your products that you might want to display on your website or product catalog. So combining two systems is obviously the thing to do here. Nothing new under the sun there, but with the release of SDL Tridion 2013 we have ECL which can shed a complete new light on this topic.

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Extracting Keywords from PDF on Multimedia upload

I came across a nice library that allows you to create and manipulate PDF documents. Apart from creating PDF documents from scratch, you can also read existing ones, convert XML to PDF, fill out interactive PDF forms, stamp new content on existing PDF documents, split and merge existing PDF documents, and much more. The best part of it is that there is a C# port available which is open source, it’s called iTextSharp. Now I haven’t explored all features of it, like PDF creation, but so far it already looks very usable.

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Extending the SDL Tridion dashboard in both the CME and Experience Manager

When you open up the SDL Tridion UI for the first time you are directed to the SDL Tridion tab which shows you a welcome screen, this is sometimes also referred to as the SDL Tridion dashboard. If you open the Experience Manager view, you actually see that the first tab is called “Dashboard”. This dashboard contains useful information for an editor and is even extensible, allowing for a rich user experience on your extensions. Typical things are settings for your own extensions, or perhaps user specific pages (like a custom page, but then tailored to the logged in user) since you have all the UI capabilities available here.

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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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