The SDL Tridion Reference Implementation (TRI) comes with out of the box controllers for loading and rendering pure content-based models. However, most web applications need to blend content with data from other sources before rendering. TRI is designed with this in mind, this post introduces the pattern for creating custom controllers which merge CMS managed content with external data.
One of the goals of the SDL Tridion Reference Implementation (TRI) is to provide an example web application for which ASP.NET MVC application developers can develop functionality without deep understanding of the underlying CMS. A key difference between a ‘classic’ MVC app and a CMS managed one is how URLs are managed and the impact this has on routing requests to controllers. In this article I dig into the mechanism used in the TRI to explain how it fits together.
Released last week – the first step on a path to lower the barriers (time, cost, knowledge, lack of standardization) of implementing SDL Tridion. In this post I aim to give a short introduction, by highlighting what you should and should not expect from the Reference Implementation.
There are a number of steps required to install SmartTarget and all the required pieces, including FredHopper and the new SmartTarget CD Webservice Extension. That’s right; Tridion’s OData Webservice now comes with a SmartTarget extension to grab your Promotions’ items… I digress. In this article I am going to assume that you’ve done your homework and read the SDL Live Content documentation regarding the necessary moving parts, wiring and plumbing, and have it all installed. (If you’re looking for an introduction to SmartTarget 2014, have a look at John Winter’s article: A look at SmartTarget 2014). So here we’ll just jump right into answering the question of how to integrate DD4T.NET with SmartTarget 2014 and I will share an MVC HTML Helper Extension class providing us with control to render SmartTarget’s Promotion Items in your DD4T-driven MVC.NET application.
I have been busy for the last few months working on a new SDL Web ‘product’ – the Tridion Standard Implementation, which is an out-of-the box Tridion CMS and web application framework to learn from/build on top of. One of the things we are focusing on is having a single site to serve all devices with optimizations driven by SDL Mobile. Part of this is ensuring that we are smart about serving images to a device, while still making life easy for editors and (MVC) view developers. There turned out to be quite a lot of factors to consider, but I think we came up with a pretty good solution. Continue reading
Reverend Green in the Conservatory with the Lead Piping?
Recently I’ve been performing some post-launch improvements to a DD4T site for a client. Â A number of their requests have been along the lines of improving screen element <x> on page <y>.
The project is reasonably large with the website being comprised from a couple of hundred abstract MVC views. Â A good amount of nested, view re-use, with nice generic css classes has actually been a detriment when it comes to tracking down exactly which view screen element <x> originates from.
Occasionally you find a view that includes some ‘start’ and ‘end’ comments in the output.
<!-- Start View: Example --> View contents go here... <!-- End View: Example -->
If you hadn’t noticed, SDL Web released a new product recently: Contextual Image Delivery, which in short enables you to resize, crop, trim and convert formats for images. I thought I would see how easy it was to set up in an ASP.NET MVC environment, and it went pretty well, but there are a few subtleties Continue reading
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.Â
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