About Will Price

Will is a seasoned web application consultant having worked on web projects for clients all over the world for the last 14 years. He has a deep technical and functional understanding of SDL Tridion solutions from his 6+ years working at SDL as a Principal Consultant in Amsterdam. Since 2012 he has been working freelance and continues to be involved in SDL Tridion projects.

Simple Release Management with SDL Tridion 2013 and Bundles

I was fortunate to have a preview version the up and coming 2013 release of SDL Tridion to play with. One new feature is Bundles, which is basically a new type of organizational item, which allows you to group together related items, and do operations on them as a whole. Typically this would be putting it through workflow, or publishing them all together in a single transaction, but one nice thing about them is that you can use them however you want to, just add items into a bundle, and use it however you need to.

The new release of Content Porter will also be bundle-aware, which got me thinking that there should be an easy way to keep track of changed items during development using bundles to avoid the pain of keeping track manually. It turns out to be really easy using the Event System.

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Quick Tip: Turn off verbose template logging in Tridion Event Log

As a good developer, you write out useful information and debug messages in your .NET TBBs using the built in templating logger. This is great when running the TBBs in the template builder to give a bit of extra info about the processing. However, by default info messages will be logged in the Tridion Event Log of your Publisher server, causing log bloat, and making it harder to see important Error and Warning messages. Its really easy to turn this off, but I am not sure I have seen it documented anywhere. Heres how…

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Adding page-free content to your site with ASP.NET MVC

MVC ASP.NETMost implementations I have worked on have sections of the website which consist of some kind of listing, which links through to pages containing detailed content. The details pages themselves contain a single ‘Full Article’ component presentation, and are often auto-created and published using the event system. As such, the pages do not really serve any purpose other than providing a definition of the url for an article. 

This article shows an alternative approach to get rid of pages for a certain section of your site and use the features of ASP.NET MVC to show content without losing ‘real’ urls

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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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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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Some thoughts on CMS/CDN Integration

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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The schemas are the easy bit… right?

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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What the REL?! – A simple and very practical use of REL

SDL Tridion introduced a new target language in the 2011 release – rather mysteriously named REL. Discussions on what exactly this is for tend to very quickly get rather technical and revolve around Dynamic Rendering, developing custom tags in Java, the new Content Delivery web service and such.

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