I've been trying for hours now to add blog posts into our site through the Umbraco back office. It feels so unintuitive how everything works and I'm beginning to get very frustrated, here's what I'm trying to do/have done:
I create a document type, "BlogPost", it contains data that can be entered in a content node relating to the blog post, description, title, etc.
I create a document type, "BlogPage", as a document type to be used as a root content node, which will hold all the BlogPost content nodes, that way I can simply loop through them and render each one on our site
I go to create the BlogPost content node, and it assigns it an url of "/", which simply redirects to the home page
What I don't understand is how am I supposed to just get data that was entered in Umbraco for my view? We have an extremely stylized theme for our site, so I can't use things like Articulate, and I shouldn't have to, all I want to do is store a collection of blog posts together, pull that data from Umbraco, and load it into an ASP.NET view, but there is absolutely zero documentation or examples of how to do this online, I would be incredibly grateful if someone could point me in the right direction on how I should go about doing what I'm trying to do.
If I understand correctly you are developing a blog section on an existing website. First thing to do is inderdaad create a new documenttype for the blogpost itself and add a documenttype for the container of blogposts.
Did you create new templates for these documenttypes? You can find some documentation on templates here
Inside the template you'll want to query data from Umbraco. Information about querying data is available here
Next up is adding the newly created templates to the documenttypes and you're ready to create your content.
Make sure that for the content you create the template is set (see Properties tab), here you can also see the url Umbraco created for the content.
Did you start the Umbraco website from scratch or are you developing on an existing website? Because a blogpost should not redirect to / by default, unless it's the root node of your website. This sounds like custom functiality. Maybe a rewrite or error handling module?
Edit: Also some information on how to get started with templating in Umbraco is available here
I'm trying to make my Umbraco layout. I have set up Umbraco before and used it, but my layout was as following:
- Home
-- About Us Page
-- Products Page
-- etc. etc.
That structure allowed me to visit / and get the home page, but having the subpages (About Us and Products) as children of Home does not make any sense. They are not connected together at all, except they all use a Master template.
If I want to make a better structured setup for my new page, I would assume this would be the best approach:
- Master
-- Home Page
-- About Us Page
-- Products Page
-- etc. etc.
However, this would mean that visiting / would give me the Master template without content, but visiting /home would give me what I want.
So what is the most ideal setup? It seems weird they are all inheriting from the Home document type, because that's what my / root page should be.
I would stick to your original plan & nest everything under Home. Having your homepage under /home/ is a bit clunky.
I use the home template as a container for all the data that is likely to be used in pages throughout the site, so I have a 'copy' section so that there is a place for every page for headline, subheadline, blurb & hero image. By using the home doc type these values can reduce complexity in back end code (if you know every page has a 'headline' field you can use it in a macro without referring to anything else or getting hit by typos).
I also have a bunch of SEO fields, social media integration, as well as navigation fields.
So use the home doctype for what is specifically on the homepage & also for stuff that is universal to the site - hopefully that is a good enough reason to setup all content under home.
Template structure is not the same as content structure.
Your content tree, which is what your plan reflects, is the structure of your site. Consider it as having the same structure as you might see in your breadcrumbs, Home always nests everything else.
Home > Products > Product 1
Your first plan is correct for Umbraco
The only reason why you would want a structure like this
- website
-- home
-- about page
-- product page
is if you want to swap out the "home" page for a different home page.
You can work around the issue by creating a WebsiteContentFinder serving the correct "home" by creating a ContentFinder. If you do so, do add a "homepage" property on the website node, to avoid searching all the children and only picking the first one...
You can achieve the second one by adding a "Content Picker" property in your Master with an alias of "umbracoRedirect"
No additional code needed that is automated by Umbraco, just select your Home Page from Master using content picker property.
You can now then access "/" displaying the homepage content.
Screenshots:
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I have a multiple site Sitecore solution. All the sites share a product range which is stored inside a 'Shared data' node that sits at the same level as the root nodes of the sites. The individual product pages on a site use a wildcard item to lookup the product based on the last part of the URL.
This means that we can't use internal links in the rich text editor to point to the product page on any of the sites because the product item does not have a specific site URL.
Does anyone know of a way to overcome this, or perhaps know of a way to augment the default behavior of interal links?
Have you considered using cloned items, see here for details.
This would allow you to share the content whilst having the appearance to the end user of the Products being inside the content tree allowing you to use the RTE and internal link look ups?
For extra information about clones, see here and here
You'd also need to do some work in the link provider to link to the cloned version of a product if you wanted. See this question.
I'm in the early stages of trying to learn Orchard, and I'm still seem to be struggling with the basics on how to build a page containing a multitude of various content that can be easily managed by non-technical users.
Ideally, what I'm trying to do is the following, I just can't figure out how to fit it into the Orchard architecture using Content Types, Parts, Fields, Widgets, Zones, etc. Also, since I'm still learning, I'm also trying to avoid any custom modules, or hard-coding content into the site (though I'm open to the idea, if that's the best way to get it done!).
Goal: Create a "home page" layout containing a Menu, Image slideshow, and several feature descriptions. For each image in the slideshow, I need a title, sub-title, description, and an image. To make this easy for non-technical users to manage, I would like to define the HTML template (custom Content Type, Part, or whatever), and allow authors to specify just those well-defined properties. I tried using Content Parts for this, but unfortunately, I can only have one Content Part of a particular type on a piece of Content. I also saw recommendations to create multiple Content Parts with the same set of properties, but I don't know how many images will be displayed (and I don't want to assign an arbitrary number).
I need to do something similar for feature descriptions, allowing authors to specify an image, title, description, and a page to link to. I'm running into the same problem as above, I'm not sure how to allow authors to specify a finite list of content, but have each content item be well-defined.
So far, the best option appears to be creating some sort of custom widget to "host" the content, but for some reason, my gut tells me that creating a custom layer for a single page just to specify which content to display is abusing the purpose of layers, which is begin able to customize a particular layout based on some criteria (whether or not the user is authenticated, for example).
I hope that made sense, and I apologize that it took so many words to explain my issue, I've just really reached my peak of frustration, and although I think that the Orchard guys definitely have it figured out in terms of architecture, I just can't get past these seemingly simple problems to build a simple website.
I greatly appreciate any tips, suggestions, advice this community has to offer!
TIA, -Jeremy
What you defined in Orchard terms is a Content Type named Feature.
Go to Contents -> Content Type, and click Create.
Select those parts by default:
Title, because you want your authors to provide a nice title/name for the features
Autoroute, which will create a SEO friendly url based on the Title (can be customized)
Click Save
Add specific Fields
SubTitle, of type TextField. Configure it to Default, Required.
Description, of type TextField. Configure it to TextArea, Required.
Image, of type Media Picker. Configure it to Required.
You can add some Hints to each fields, which will be displayed in the Feature editor to describe what to enter in each field. Very useful for authors.
Now you can create Features by clicking on the link in the top left part of the Dashboard.
Next step is to put those features on the homepage. What I suggest is to create a Projection which will be set as the homepage. A Projection is just a Page with an Url, which will display the result of a query as its content. The Query in your case will be "Give me all Features ordered by Creation Date".
In the dashboard, click on Queries
Click on "Create a new Query"
Enter "All Features"
Click on "Add a new Filter"
Select Content Type, then select Feature, Save
Click on "Add a sort Criterium"
Select "Creation Date", then Descending, Save
At this point, you can already preview the result of the query by clicking on Preview. But what we want is a front-end page.
Create a new Projection by clicking on Projection in the "New" section of the dashboard (top left again)
- Give it a title, and don't forget to check "Set as Home page" to make it the home page
- Select the only available query, named "All Featrues"
- Save
On the home page you should see all the features, ordered by date. But what you want is a slider. At that point you need two more steps:
- Integrate a slider jQuery plugin
- Render the HTML compatible with your jQuery plugin
By default, when you render a Projection it will use the standard "Summary" layout. But using projections you can decide exactly what layout you want to apply, and exactly what html tags and classes.
Edit the query named "All Features"
Add a new Layout
Select Html List
Select "Properties" and Save
Click Add Properties
Select Display Text, Save
Do the same for
Feature:SubTitle
Feature:Description
Feature:Image
Save your query
Edit the home page projection and select this specific Layout instead of the default one.
You will see that each property is rendered in an html container.
By editing each property you can decide which class to apply, and which html tag to use. By changing them you can render exactly what you want, and customize your CSS/HTML to render the slider nicely. This is purely your HTML know have to apply here, or find some articles about that.
For your editors, they just have to go to the dashboard and add/update some feature content items, it will be reflected on the website.
Optionally there is a Slider module on the Orchard Gallery. You can try this one too. But if you want to handle exactly what happens the technique I described is better.
I've just gone through this exact scenario myself. I think that what you want can be accomplished using Orchard Lists. The UX is not exactly intuitive for the end user, but it seems like it's the most straightforward way to accomplish this goal without installing/developing a custom module.
First, make sure you're using Orchard 1.4 because you'll need the built-in support for generating alternates for Container Widgets for each zone. Enable the Shape tracing, Url alternates and Widget alternates modules.
Now, create a list of items as described in the documentation (see http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Creating-lists). Translate "book review" into "slide" and "book reviews" into "slides" and you get the idea. You can add custom fields to represent your subtitle, description, etc. I'd just keep the image as part of the content itself instead of creating a custom field for it.
If you've followed the steps in the documentation, you should now be seeing a list of your slides rendered as ul/li's. Now you'll want to customize how things are rendered so you can show your custom fields and generally customize the tags. Use the shape tracer and create alternates for the list as you see fit. Now you're free to control all the rendering. See http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2011/03/27/taking-over-list-rendering-in-orchard.aspx and http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2011/05/23/orchard-list-customization-first-item-template.aspx for ideas.
Managing this list from your end-user's perspective is actually quite easy, but I don't really feel that it's very intuitive.
It took me three days of digging through blogs and docs to figure this out for myself.
I'd also recommend this wonderful module called Featured Item Slider. It has all the basic functionalities of a slideshow, including all mentioned in the question, plus some fantastic additional capabilities, such as different animations. You can also fine tune the layout and styling by providing additional css. Get the source here. And here is the slideshow in action. If a module already exists providing the functionality you're looking for, then it's best to use that rather than reinvent the wheel, unless you do it for learning purposes.
I'm working on an umbraco website just now and one of the requirements is to have a custom section in the back end that can be used to manage publish smaller micro-sites.
I have been able to create the new section and added some nodes to it. What I can't get to work is publishing them and making them viewable at the correct url.
As an example, say i have created a new section called microsite, inside that there is a folder called myportfolio. this should route to something like www.myumbracosite.com/microsite/myportfolio.
Does anyone know how to get this sort of thing working? Is it even possible to publish content from outsite of the main content section?
Any help would be greatly apprechiated.
Kind Regards
Colin G
From my understanding the custom sections are for linking to custom databases or data somewhere that needs an interface.
That said, you can use UrlRewriting and an existing content page with a macro to do something like that.
If you had a page called microsite, then using UrlRewriting you could make the parameter passed in to microsite.aspx (a content page in Umbraco) be "myportfolio".
With a user control on the microsite template it could display some content from your external database (or wherever your custom section stores it).
Not sure that's what you're looking for...
Why are you trying to create a new section for more content? The current Umbraco content area has all kinds of permissions for both users and members. Are the microsites all in the same install of Umbraco?
Another option is that the custom section could simply be used as a setup wizard for the new sites. You could create new content and users in their normal places and just use the new section to create them. It's not too hard to create content from C#, so it would probably be the same as doing it from a user control.
Could you provide a little more info?