Category Archives: Community

The Community XSLT Mediator vs. SDL Tridion 2013 XSLT Template Building Blocks

Posted on by
1

A brief history of the XSLT Mediator for SDL Tridion
Back in 2007/08, Tridion introduced a modular template framework called Compound Templates with R5.3. At the time you could use a combination of Template Building Blocks written in Dreamweaver (DWTs), C# Fragments and .NET assemblies to manipulate items in a package and add them to the output of your Compound Template.

This was a giant leap forward from what are now called legacy templates (VBScript, JScript and classic XSLT Component Templates) in SDL Tridion 2013. The concept of Compound Templates remains strong today, and is the primary way that developers render their content.

One of the key features of the template framework, was that it could be extended to support additional programming languages through the creation of Mediators. Over the years as developers got frustrated with the out-of-the-box mediators (C# Fragments, DWT and .NET assemblies), a number of community built Mediators have reared their heads, including ones for XSLT, Razor and Java. Continue reading →

Decommission a Publication Target

Posted on by
3

Decommission a Publication TargetWith the release of SDL Tridion 2013 SP1, we get a lot of new functionality. One of the interesting features I found was the ability to decommission a Publication Target. This feature is added to the Core Service, and currently not directly available from the UI. Which sounded like a good exercise to make a UI extension, with which you can call this new method.

Continue reading →

It is not too late…

Posted on by
Reply

MVP award logoDecember is the time to look back, and if you have been doing a sprint of 365 days, now is the time to start to think about the retrospective. That is exactly what the MVP Selection Panel is doing right now. To select the new MVP’s for the SDL Tridion MVP Award program, we need to evaluate each nominee’s voluntary contribution to the SDL Tridion community over the past 12 months. Which is why I would like to mention, it is not too late.

Continue reading →

ECL event handlers

Posted on by
6

illustrationIn my previous post about ECL, I’ve discussed querying ECL Metadata in the Broker, by making it available as part of the Multimedia (stub) Component Metadata. Now in that post I explained how it could be copied at Publishing time and the “evil” twists that process came with. In this post I’ll discuss an optional approach, using the SDL Tridion Event System which makes the process of copying external metadata to (normal) metadata less evil (just the process, not the fact that we do it ;o).

Continue reading →

The Field Behavior Injection extension or SDL Tridion Behavior Field Framework

Posted on by
5

FBI logo During the 2013 SDL Tridion MVP retreat I’ve worked on the FBI extension, also known as the BFF framework. Now some of you might think that all the MVPs do during that event is drink and have fun, which is actually right. The MVPs, love SDL Tridion, they love to code, they like to have fun and they enjoy a drink while they talk. So while at the retreat, they are actually in their natural element since everybody likes the same things and those things are all actually done during their stay (sometimes at the same time). Mind you coding and drinking don’t always mix, liquids dripping out of a laptop is one of the least fun things we actually saw this year.
Continue reading →

Using .NET Resources for localization in UI extensions

Posted on by
1

As by now you all have gathered, the annual MVP retreat has started and 16 MVPs are currently hard at work in a castle in Óbidos, Portugal. Our team, is working on what was defined on LinkedIn as Custom Editor Screens, for which we chose the working title Tridion Field Behavior Injection (available as open source on Google code of course).

Continue reading →

Tridion Search Engine Integration – Stop re-inventing the wheel

Posted on by
Reply

On a recent project, it was required to do a quick integration between Tridion and a search engine (in this case Solr). We needed to push content directly in the index, rather than using a crawling approach, and there were a couple of simple search interfaces, including the ubiquitous one-box search to integrate in the web application.

Sound familiar? It may well do… almost every Tridion project requires integration with some kind of search engine, and I have to confess I am guilty of re-inventing the wheel most of the time, hacking some code from the previous project around to create something that suits the requirement of the next project

This time I thought, lets do it differently – wouldn’t it be great if there was a generic framework for search integration, that could be used on any Tridion Search Engine integration project, which you could configure/extend (controlled hacking!) as required for the particular project requirements?

Raimond Kempees and I have created that framework as an open source project and presented it at this weeks Tridion Community Webinar.

I will follow with some more posts on this project, but as a teaser, our goal is to take your existing (Tridion 2011+) implementation and have you indexing content, and a simple one-box-search running on your site in less than 2 hours, using the out-of-the-box features of the framework, and the open source search engine Solr.

Extracting Keywords from PDF on Multimedia upload

Posted on by
1

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.

Continue reading →