How can I support user edited content in a complex web application? - asp.net-mvc

I'm building a web site (using ASP.NET, MVC 3, Razor) and I'm not using an off the shelf CMS. This is because I evaluated a lot of existing CMS's, and found them all to have a massive learning curve, tons of features I didn't need, and they force you into a page oriented model. By "page oriented model", I mean that you can specify a general page layout and stylesheets, but the object that the user can edit is a whole page, which displays, for example, in a central panel, and maybe you can customize the sidebars as well.
But this site is very design centric, and needs to be much more fluid and granular than this. By "design-centric", I mean that the site was built in Photoshop by a graphic designer, and there is heavy use of images and complex styling to map the design to HTML/css/js. Also, every page on the site is totally different. There are also UI elements such as accordion panels, in which we need the user to be able to edit the content of each panel, but certainly not the jQuery+HTML that powers the accordion. The users are subject matter experts but very non-technical.
So I'll have a page with lots of complex layout and styling, which I don't want the user to access, but within this there will be, say, a div containing text that I would like the user to be able to edit.
How can I best accomplish this?
So far, I'm implementing this by having snippets, which are little units of html, stored in external files, that the user can edit. In run mode, these are loaded and displayed inline (with a little "Edit This Content" button if you're logged in and have permissions). If you click the Edit button, you get a little WYSIWYG editing screen, where you can edit and save changes. So I can control all the messy stuff, and put in little placeholders for user editable content. But this isn't entirely simple for me, and I'm wondering if there's a better way.

Don't mean to necro this, but it seems to be the most relevant question to what I'm currently researching. I recently built something similar as you described above, but I'm pulling data from a database instead of static files. For each page (like /about or /contact) in the Controller I pull data for that page from the DB in the form of a Json string key/value pair. Key is the placeholder tag, Value is the.. value. After deserializing, I simply populate a list and assign it to a ViewBag, then in the CSHTML I ViewBag.List.Keyname to grab the text.
I have a small admin control panel which allows me to modify the text in the database. Having little hover-overs like you do is a great idea though!

Well, I stuck with my original plan:
So far, I'm implementing this by having snippets, which are little
units of html, stored in external files, that the user can edit. In
run mode, these are loaded and displayed inline (with a little "Edit
This Content" button if you're logged in and have permissions). If you
click the Edit button, you get a little WYSIWYG editing screen, where
you can edit and save changes. So I can control all the messy stuff,
and put in little placeholders for user editable content. But this
isn't entirely simple for me, and I'm wondering if there's a better
way.
It works reasonably well for now.

Related

Rails - manipulating data in popup

I'm new in Rails, I have a Meal model which has many Products. Meals are assign to User (maybe this is important for a concept). In meals/new.html.erb I want to create new Meal as follow:
Click the button "Display Products"
On the same page (meals/new.html.erb) open modal (pop-up) with all products assigned to current user ( I have help method for current-user). It should be displayad like a list or grid with checboxes for example.
Then user can check few products and click "Confirm".
After that in meals/new.html should be appeared list of chosen products with additional input to fill their quantity.
So I have two problem here.
How should I display modal? Is needed any Ajax (I'm not so familiar with this technology)
How can I pass products between view and modal?
Could you help me a little to achieve these goals?
Regarding your first problem, displaying the modal is fairly straight forward. Essentially you will create a div with the proper bootstrap classes to be hidden when the page is loaded, and then create a button that makes it visible. I would recommend either reading over the W3Schools entry on modals, or from the appropriate part of the bootstrap javascript documentation.
Regarding your second question, this depends on exactly what you mean. The modal is part of the view, so if you're only trying to put information that is currently on the modal back onto the "page" behind it, you can do so fairly simply with javascript (copying content out of one element into another, or updating states of inputs). If, on the other hand, you're trying to use the modal to retrieve information from the server (for instance if you wanted to show a list of possible options, and then display detailed information about the selected items from the database) that would require Ajax.
If you have any snippets of code that aren't functioning as you expect, feel free to add your View to the question. In cases like this, usually the best way for us to provide help is for you to take an early crack at this, post the relevant code, and then seek answers for the things that behave unexpectedly.
I hope that helps.

Ember search engine

I am creating an Ember app that has a search engine built into it say for houses. My results change a lot as houses are found / added or removed / sold. Therefore my search results change all the time.
I also have pages for each house which has a similar houses section on it that shows always changing similar houses to this one.
I am trying to find the best way to make this app crawlable to search engines.
I could like discourse use noscript tages for each page but as all my houses pages can hold different information and structure depending on the agent/ seller this would be a lot more work basically duplicating what the client is doing!
I could go down the phantomjs route and cache all my pages and serve via the escapedfragment_ method but i am thinking this would be a resource intensive approach with content changing so much. Also with my house pages having similar houses on them that can change depending on the user / location etc, i am not sure how to cache these sections.
Another method i am toying with is to convert my page / section templates into a serverside template so i can render it on the server. For example when a customer creates a house page via my ember app in the format they require they click publish and i convert the rendered html into serverside template with placeholders etc for data.
Anyone help with this ? Any ideas / suggestions / advice would be great!
I think you've kind of answered your own question. This is all about trade offs and finding the solution that is best for your particular case. There is no silver bullet. Personally I go with something close to the noscript route, but instead of putting things inside noscript tags, I put them in regular divs with a class of no-ember, which are visible by default. Then when the document is ready I test to see if the client supports push state. If so, I initialize my Ember app and hide the no-ember divs. If not, then all of the no-ember divs are visible so that the client can see/use the content like normal.

Building a site with Orchard CMS

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.

Loading data from database by Ajax - Ruby on Rails app

Sometimes at websites all comments or other data from DB is hidden by default. When user click at link like "Display comments" all comments from database are dynamically selected and placed under the content. It must be great for mysql performance, because content is generated only when user excatly need it. I would like to implement this stuff at my app.
I've got one idea to do this so far. Remote action with #comments = Content.comments and next page.insert_html at RJS template. Is it good idea or maybe I should choose different way?
The decision is purely based on the application that you are developing. For example if in case of stack overflow it does not make sense to show only the question and show answer link. But in case of a blog post it may be fine.
In the above situation, I don't think there will be a good improvement in performance by removing the comments of the content on show page. We can achieve the same functionality by making use of javascript methods. Hide the content on page load and show in on client request.

Different Editors for one column in EditorGridPanel ExtJS

I am trying to show/load different editor on different rows of a editorgridpanel. Like a textbox on one row combobox/superboxselect on another and it could be any order, random.
The conditions which dictate which editor will be shown reside in the database.
Please tell me if this is possible and if so, how do i go about it.. I have tried pulling the conditions asynchronously which are pulled on a click event for the respective column, but calling it async causes problems. Please advise
Anything is possible, but what you want to do would take a bit of work. The basic idea would be to configure the needed grid editor(s) dynamically and update the columns with the new editors when needed. Now... what would be required to make that actually work I couldn't say offhand without digging into the Ext source -- it would almost definitely require overriding default behavior in the grid and/or column model.
Pulling your conditions asynchronously would (I imagine) be too slow for the interaction of clicking on a row to edit inline. If it takes a second or more from click to configured editors, that would not be acceptable performance. I would try to find a way to send your conditions down along with the other row data if at all possible (they can be in the store's data model on the client without having to be shown in the grid).
Without knowing more about your business requirements, it might be more appropriate to ditch the editable grid and instead go with a dynamically-configured FormPanel tied to the grid. This way the interaction of clicking and then pausing slightly while the form is configured would appear to be more natural. Also, the functionality of rendering a form with a particular configuration is perfectly standard and would require nothing fancy on your end. See this example as a starting point (your form would be dynamic, but maybe the same type of interaction could work?)

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