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.
Most 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.
I 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…