SmartTarget Extensions: Better Security on Promotion Management

If you have used SmartTarget, you will probably know that the security model for managing promotions is pretty basic – you either have rights to manage promotions or you don’t. On my current implementation we have different business units managing their own SmartTarget promotions for various sites and applications, all within the same CMS, so all able to view, edit (and accidentally break!) each others promotions. This post shows a simple solution we came up with to ensure each user could only manage appropriate promotions.

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An Introduction to Theme Manager, My First Alchemy Plugin

This is John's car. Seemed relevant.

This is John’s car. Seemed relevant.

I’ll let the video do most of the talking (yeah, I did a video walkthrough of the basic functionality), but the basic premise is this: on a whim (and a challenge from John), I set about creating an Alchemy plugin from scratch. Prior to this my experience with UI extensions was minimal, but Alex and John have been hooting for weeks that developing an Alchemy plugin is about a thousand times easier than creating one from scratch. So I accepted, and wrote a theme manager that allows for previewing, installing, and all sorts of other shenanigans… and a (mostly) complete theme… in less than a week.

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Using a GUI extension for RTF fields with regular Text fields

This is a follow up post on my previous post about a tree-view item picker. Right now, this Tridion GUI extension works well for rich text fields : when you click a button in the ribbon toolbar, you get a popup with a number of keywords, and when the user selects a keyword, some property of that keyword is inserted in the rich text field.

Now, the same functionality had to be achieved for regular text fields. Tridion has a lot functionality available for dealing with RTF fields, but extending this to regular text fields requires some extra custom coding

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Use a treeview item picker in your GUI extensions

Recently, I was asked to build a Tridion GUI extension that would let users insert a key of a Keyword in a rich text field. Users would have to click a button in the ribbon toolbar, get a list of keywords, pick one, and the GUI extension would work it’s magic.

There are some nice examples of this to be found here, so i managed to wrap up a solution pretty quick, and life was good.

After some testing, it turned out that the amount of items in the dropdown would grow to large – if you have only 10 or 20 items to pick from, that’s fine, but what if there are hundreds…

So, a new requirement was added : “can we not have a dropdown of keywords, but a tree view, so users would be able to drill-down to find the keyword they want”. 

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