Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Last week I talked about an approach to displaying template-related help fields in Content Editor. The last week has been a bit manic, so I've not managed to spend much time on extending these ideas, but I have a basic approach to displaying similar data in Page Editor. Quick one today...
One of the challenges of building sites with Sitecore can be making sure that your content editors understand the purpose of each template and what data they're supposed to be filling in for each field to build up their site. This can be a challenge for complex sites – the data model required for building a complex and feature packed site can sometimes be difficult to explain to non-technical editors.
Historically I've usually tackled this problem though documentation and training sessions – but it struck me the other day that Sitecore itself should be able to help too.
So I've been experimenting with the basics of a really simple prototype for explaining templates. I'll explain a what I was thinking about for Content Editor this week, and hopefully offer some ideas for adding similar behaviour to Page Editor next week.
A while back I wrote up the faceted search example I'd presented at the London Sitecore User Group, and commented that ASP.Net WebForms wasn't really great technology for providing that sort of UI. I noted that it would work better if it could be implemented using Ajax-style UI.
Having finally had a chance to work out a basic pattern for building JSON web services using the sort of technology that's easily available in basic Sitecore 6.6 websites last week, I've now had a chance to get around to implementing a prototype of how the faceted search might be built with client-side processing.
Whilst it's nice and easy to create JSON services for your front-end JavaScript if you're working in ASP.Net MVC, things can be a bit more difficult to wire together if you find yourself with project requirements that force you to work with the older bits of ASP.Net. Getting the JSON inputs and outputs to work can caused me some head-scratching.
Having had to make this work recently, I thought I'd write down where I ended up after searching Stack Overflow and MSDN...
Having looked at all the pipeline components for package generation last week, now it's time for a wrap up for this series.
As I mentioned in one of the earlier posts, as I worked through the code for this prototype, I changed my mind a bit on some of the basic architecture for the core program from the first post. I ended up re-working the configuration from the original idea and making the source control input and package saving output into configurable options.
