Category Archives: UI

Have an Idea for Tridion Sites 9.1?

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My fellow Product Owners for SDL Tridion Sites have an interesting challenge to somehow understand and clarify the top community product ideas to size them for prioritization against everything else that will be in the Tridion Sites 9.1 release (scheduled for after Sites 9, if the version wasn’t clear).

My colleague Rick has been leading this effort and I’m doing my part to point out all the (many) channels we have in the community and ways to solicit feedback. Ironically, it’s hard to get feedback that we can use to actually understand and size a few of these ideas, especially after I’ve noticed everyone seems to have an idea.
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Extending the SDL Knowledge Center GUI

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Many of us are familiar with GUI extensions in SDL Web, as well as Alchemy plugins, which integrate into the GUI via the Aguilla JavaScript framework. With SDL Knowledge Center, the story is a bit different. At first glance, Knowledge Center appears to have a GUI very similar to Web’s, in terms of look and feel. Under the hood, however, it’s implemented differently. There is no Anguilla. Anguilla is more of a Tridion thing. And from my experience, the concept of a GUI extension does not really exist in KC. There is documentation on plugins and extensions. But there is no clear, simple approach to extending the GUI, as far as I can tell. In this post, I outline a simple technique for extending the GUI functionality of your Knowledge Center implementation.

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Updating list: Anguilla Code Snippets

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anquillaI’ve been keeping a little notepad file on my machine for a while some of common code snippets that help when building SDL Tridion Gui / Alchemy extensions. I thought it would be great to share them with the community in the hope that they can help someone, and others can contribute.

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Improve the Publishing “Experience”

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booksSo, you’ve got a release going on and some 20 people are publishing. AÂ few of the editors only have a page or two to publish but some of them then select to publish the whole site and a few have published only whole Structure Groups!

How many of these publish by Structure Group! And, I ask, Why?

Why do it in the first place?

The first answer I hear a lot is

I don’t know exactly what to publish

man-typing-thoughtless

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DXA Modules Settings Interface

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Recently I had the pleasure of traveling to Portugal for the SDL Web Most Valued Professional (MVP) retreat. While this was my first opportunity to participate in one of these events, I have seen the results of having some of the brightest and most willing-to-share minds in the SDL Web community brought together for the opportunity to collaborate. Often times in the past this event has helped to shape the future of SDL Web development, and this year was no exception. Continue reading →

What, Why Can’t I Publish My Stuff?

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You’ve set up your content delivery environment and have your topologies all ready to go. Your publication has a Business Process Type, so you go to publish your first bit of content…

What? Where are my targets?

Huh? Where’s the target? You try a CME refresh, service restarts, even a server reboot with no luck.

This is a little gotcha that Dom Cronin pointed out at TDS 2016 and which I missed. As well as creating a business process type (BPT), that BPT also needs to be specified in a publication’s properties before you can publish items to it from that publication.

So, add your BPT to your publication’s properties

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and you will have your target available when publishing items from your publication. All is now good with the world.

yay

SmartTarget Extensions: Better Security on Promotion Management

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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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Demystifying Tridion’s Checkout Behaviour

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“Tridion seems to choose random times to not check in my items and I don’t notice it until I’m well into my debugging.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who has heard this, or thought it silently to myself. Of course, everyone knows that software doesn’t often do “random”, and if you pay enough attention and get a little lucky you can usually find a pattern to when an unexpected behaviour is happening. In this case I’ve spoken to a number of experienced Tridion users and gotten some good ideas on why items might stay open.

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