I am attempting to set up a shared content repository in Umbraco 7. Ideally I would like something like:
ParentGroup
--SubGroup
----contentItem
I would like this structure and then I would like sub sites to be able to pick and choose which content they use, whilst keeping the grouping. I've looked at the multi node tree picker and this looks promising.
I am struggling however with how to organise the content into groups, a group would really be a text label, do I just create a content type without a template for this or is there a better way.
I think creating a document type without a template is the way to go. Every content item in the content tree is defined by it's documenttype and it's perfectly reasonable that not every content item translates directly to a page, thus not having a template.
Related
We recently upgraded our Kentico 8.2 instance to 9.0 and are now focusing on localizing our site into two additional cultures. The textual content of our site is primarily stored in one of three places:
Editable regions
Text fields in custom page types
Custom tables
We're using the Kentico EMS license and would like to leverage the built-in Translation Services app in order to translate content in each of these locations, however it appears that it only supports with content within editable regions. I know Kentico has an input control for translating text boxes but it forces the content editor to create a distinct resource key for it; we simply have so much content I'm concerned this will get out of control for editors.
Additionally, we had considered migrating some of our content into pages but they don't logically fit there, and there are some complex relationships that would cause duplicate content so I'd really prefer to keep the content where it is. The other thought I had was to build either a custom module or custom form control to do some dirty work under the covers but didn't want to reinvent the wheel if there was already a known approach.
Is there a Kentico recommended approach, or workaround, to managing content translations within custom tables and page type fields?
You can use Translation in Kentico to translate page type fields and send them for translation. Check this documentation page for an example. It can be more complex at first, but it should do the trick for you. I have just tested creating a simple translation request for my page type and the resulting XLF file contained all page type fields.
For custom tables I will have to dissapoint you because custom tables in Kentico are not culture specific. If performance is important for you the best way to create translations is to add CultureCode field to your table in order to specify which culture the item is for.
For example you can have table with columns: ItemID, Text, CultureCode
And then the data would look like:
1, Dog, en-US
2, Hund, ge-GE
3, Pes, cs-CZ
If you would want to go even step further I would recommend to create this not as a custom table, but as a Custom class which will sit inside a custom module for which you can create your own interface which would allow editors to easily create all culture versions for the items.
For the custom page types and custom tables, you can change those text fields to localized text fields at the field definition and it will allow you to enter different values per language without a resource key. This is the best route IMHO for page types and custom table translation. Although this still does not allow for "automatic" or built-in translation.
I am not sure what do you mean by content translation in page type fields - there is support for translating page type fields. You can find example on sample site in Kentico installation. (The site is called DancingGoat - see image example for page type field localization in english and spanish language).
I am fairly new to Umbraco and I am wondering where I should put pieces of random data.
I have a lot of experience with Sitecore, used it for several years, I am certified etc etc. But now I have to build something with Umbraco. At a first glance Umbraco looks inferior to Sitecore in every way, but I might be wrong about that.
So what I am wondering is, where should I put non-browsable pieces of data that are visible on several places throughout the website? I'd like to create data items in Umbraco for things like Testimonials, Offices? I'd like to have a centralized place in Umbraco where they can be maintained and reference them from a page node. But the way it looks now is that everything has to be on the page node. Which is sort ok, for your average family webpage.
Could someone please shed some light on this?
You could create another node under the man content and call it site settings and store them there that way all pages under the home page are just visible pages on the front end and all data nodes are in a separate area.
There is one property in umbraco that you can add to document types and name it "umbracoNaviHide" (for alias, the name can be anything). This allows wires in automatically to the .IsVisible() method.
var children = Model.Content.Children.Where(x => x.IsVisible());
I find this situation to be very frequent, think of slideshows. When I make an Umbraco website, under my root node I normalle havea Slideshow document type (that contains slides) and I programmatically traverse those to build the slideshow on the home page for example. This Slideshow document has that "umbracoNaviHide" property and I skip it from my menus either using the .IsVisible() method or by manually skipping specific document types.
var menuItems = Model.Content.Children.Where(x => x.DocumentTypeAlias != "Slideshow" && x.DocumentTypeAlias != "Search");
On the other hand, if you are looking for "labels", you can look at "Dictionnary" items under the "Settings" tab.
To directly answer your questions, I reccomend putting non-browsable pieces of data as children of the relevant browsable content node. (But there are other valid ways to do this, it really is up to you and what's best for your content editors.)
Hope this helps.
This may be a dumb question, but partly for posterity's sake, I want to ask it. I am sure that others who are learning how to use Orchard for the first time will wonder it as well.
I want to create a content type (preferably from within the CMS itself) that has a single image as one of its content parts. The goal is to present users creating a new instance of the content type with a field that includes a single image upload which will be the featured image for that content type. Does that make sense?
There are two fields you can add to your content type that will do this:
Image Field
http://gallery.orchardproject.net/List/Modules/Orchard.Module.Contrib.ImageField
Or
Media Picker Field (included in Orchard 1.6)
I'm pretty new to Umbraco, so my question may turn out to be pretty simple, but I wasn't able to find any simple guide on it online.
I'm building a simple website with one domain and structure as follows
Content
- en
-- products
-- contacts
- cs
-- produkty
-- kontakty
and so on. My first question is: since I want to accomplish some nice results in SEO, I need to (i) assign meta language to contents of "en" and "cs" nodes, as well as some keywords. How should I do this?
Second: Say that in the future, I decide to add a new language, ex. Russian. So what I would need to do is to make a copy of the "en" node and its contents while the links included in the newly created copy should be rewritten to point at the copy and not the original (original would be /en/anotherpage, which should be rewritten to /ru/anotherpage). Is this possible?
Thanks,
Ondrej
You could build the content structure as a single root node and then have multiple Language homepage nodes directly beneath the content root.
To assign a language, you could create a custom datatype that simply displays all the .Net cultures, e.g. en-GB, fr-FR etc. Include that data type as a field on the language homepage document type and then output this value in the markup on the homepage and each descendant.
In the Language homepage document type, you can add a textstring property called 'umbracoUrlName'. You can then use this property to override the Url name. E.g. So you could call the page www.domain.com/en/ instead of www.domain.com/en/english-home/
With regards to duplicating the site at a later date, this is a difficult one. If the links are created using data types like the media picker and uComponent's multi node tree picker, then you will have no option but to inherit the links from the copied branch. However, if the links are created dynamically in the Razor or XSLT, then you should be able to make the links relative to the Language homepage or the current page. E.g. in XSLT getting the children of the parent language homepage would be something like $currentPage/ancestors-or-self::* [#level = '2']/child::* . In other words you can avoid hard coding links by using a clever bit of relative traversal.
This should give you a good start on creating multilingual sites in Umbraco
http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/running-multi-lingual-sites-under-a-single-domain
If you was to create a Russian version in the future you would do exactly what you have mentioned above, its that easy.
To set the language meta data I would store this in a property on the langauge root node eg: /en/ to get the language page property from any page:
var langNode = new Node(int.Parse(node.Path.Split(',')[1]));
langNode.GetProperty("languageCode");
As for copying the English version to the Russian version and fixing all the links, I'm not aware of anything in umbraco to help you with this, you could write something yourself to find all the links and node references and fix them. you could use the relations API to keep track of what was copied from where to where. You'll need to be aware that you could end up copying nodes more than once.
If you don't have too much data, manually fixing links may be quicker.
I am in the process of building a super simple CMS to handle smaller "static" page type projects (e.g. - small sites for friends). I have different "page types" that I would like to add. I built something similar in Coldfusion previously. Looked something like this:
table content_type:
content_type_code varchar(10)
content_type_name
table content:
content_id
content_type_code varchar(10)
content_name
content_desc
content_url
I would create a content type called "blog" or "photo" and each time a content was added, it'd get assigned the content_type_code. Then in /blog/ I'd query for all content that had a content_type_code of "blog".
Now that I'm using Ruby/RoR I am trying to think about things differently. I was thinking a better way might be to use nested pages with awesome_nested_set (https://github.com/collectiveidea/awesome_nested_set). But I'm not sure if that's the best solution.
Then I could create a page called "blog" and add to that many pages. So essentially the top level would take place of the "content_type" from my previous example.
Can someone steer me in the right direction on what the best method would be? I'm a newb looking for a kick in the right direction.
EDIT
I should add that the only real thing that I would change between the different "types" of content would be the layout and where they are displayed ("photo" content at /photos/, "blog" content at /blog/).
I try to recap:
You want to build a CMS
Your CMS manages a single web site
A web site is made of content
There are differenti type of contents, and I am assuming every type of content has its own behaviour
Contents are organized in a tree
Here is the plan I suggest you:
Create the Content resource; use the scaffold to have something already working, adding few field (title and body in example)
Add validations to your new model
Write a couple of unit tests against your validation (quite useless, just to see how it works)
Install awesome_nested_set and manage to make it working with your model
Work on the UI to make it quite easy to create new content, move content around, edit a single content
Now its time to implement the content types; STI is the Rails way, but I have to warn you it can be really hard. I suggest you to reiterate 1, 2, 3, 5 to create new models for Photo and BlogPost
Once you will be there, you will have hundreds of ideas to implement. Have fun :)
Instead of using content_type I would rather let the user choose a model on a selection page, like "photo" or "blog" and load an editing page based on that selection. So the user wants a new 'blog'-entry they get redirected to blog/new or 'photo' for photo/new. It's the easiest way to go in terms of usability and your controlling backend and you don't have redundant data (for example an empty photo url which is not necessary in a blog-type) in your database.