I have tried searching the official documentation and related message boards for this however I have been unable to find anything related.
Some of the templates for pages in my website are only to be used once - e.g. homepage.
Is there a way in Wagtail to hide or disallow users from selecting that template/Page model when creating a new page?
You can limit the places it is possible to create a page type, by editing YourPageModel.parent_page_types, see http://docs.wagtail.io/en/v1.10.1/reference/pages/model_reference.html#wagtail.wagtailcore.models.Page.parent_page_types. Similarly there is a subpage_types setting, so for instance you can enforce that NewsIndexPage can only be created as a direct child of HomePage, and can only contain NewsItemPage instances. Combining this with user permissions should be enough for home pages or page types at a high enough place in the tree.
If you absolutely must enforce that only one of a certain page type exists, it is possible to override the classmethod clean_parent_page_models, to return [] if an instance of this class already exists. This approach is a hack, however, and may be broken by future versions of Wagtail.
Update, January 2021:
The hack above isn't exactly broken, but it certainly wasn't ideal, and since version 2.4 Wagtail has had the max_count Page attribute (and max_count_per_parent in 2.5).
Documentation: https://docs.wagtail.io/en/stable/reference/pages/model_reference.html#wagtail.core.models.Page.max_count
#JaredOzzy's answer is correct, and has more details on these methods.
Anybody coming here looking for something similar, Wagtail has now added 2 nifty properties that we can use to limit pages from being created more than a specific amount of times.
http://docs.wagtail.io/en/v2.5.1/reference/pages/model_reference.html#wagtail.core.models.Page.max_count
max_count
Controls the maximum number of pages of this type that can be created through the Wagtail administration interface. This is useful when needing “allow at most 3 of these pages to exist”, or for singleton pages.
and
max_count_per_parent.
Controls the maximum number of pages of this type that can be created under any one parent page.
Related
Question Context
I am responsible to design the cms architecture for a project.
The requirements state that a group of editors should be able to create "Projects".
Each project..
saves meta data about itself
is queryable from other places (e.g. top 5 projects).
has a page that displays information about it. (does not need to be a cms page instance)
can be connected to countries (meaning that an implementation of that project exists in the selected counties).
can have sub-pages which in turn can also be nested.
Imagined Example
Using the django-cms documentation as a bases I would image the resulting structure to look like this:
Projects (apphook)
"Project 1" (Page for project 1 model instance)
"Project 2" (Page for project 2 model instance)
"Project 2 Subpage 1" (Subpage for project 2 model instance)
"Project 2 Subpage 2" (Subpage for project 2 model instance)
"Project 2 Sub-Subpage" (Subpage of "Project 2 Subpage 2")
However that does not seem to exist or at least I did not see any references on how to get such a structure.
In a video I heard that as soon as there is an apphook.. subpages do not make sense anymore.
Somewhere else I read that in theory if the hook is permissive enough.. it could be combined. However even if that works.. the subpages would not be liked to actual instances of the custom apphook model.
PS: I am currently using: django-cms==3.3.0
Question
How can I feature such a structure using django-cms?
I figured it could be done by having an apphooked page for each project. In that case.. the server would have to be restarted for every newly created project. That does not seem to be very elegant.
Alternatives
I have been working with wagtail on a previous project. Thus I do know how to implement such a structure with wagtail easily using ProjectPage and ProjectSubpage models.
I refuse to give up on django-cms being capable of replicating such functionality. I am open for alternative paradigms and approaches. Maybe there are some I have not thought of. If so please let me know. :)
Request
Guidance and ideas are very welcome!
Please tell me if you know of any way how to get that or have some idea that could point me in the right direction.
Thank you!
A couple of points here for you.
django CMS can happily serve pages "beneath" and apphook, but the apphook gets priority during URL resolution. So, just make sure that your apphook's URL patterns don't gobble up everything and sub-pages should be OK.
An alternative approach would be to make a one-to-many table that holds "page-like" attributes (title, meta-attributes, etc.) and at least one PlaceholderField. This can then be used to present what appears to be normal CMS pages that the apphook-itself can control with its views. So, you could have apphook-model-specific context and url-patterns and still have almost all of the front-end editing features of the CMS.
I hope this helps!
I used to implement listing/detail scenarios using wildcard items, meaning that, for the sake of URL, I create a regular item to display the list and then under that node, I create a wildcard item to represent all possible detail pages, like:
/news/*
(i generate a friendly name by code to replace wildcard and produce the full URL such as: mywebsite.com/news/the-meeting-press-release)
Then I create a folder or a bucket of content items somewhere else as my repository. Then I assign same datasource to listing node and wildcard node to give them same repository of content items.
Main reason I want to do this is to use datasources and make navigational nodes (which generate actual pages and URLs) to be separate from Content folder structure. In other words, separation of concerns: navigational items as presentation nodes and content items as my data repository.
This is an easy way to work around master/detail requirements but I always feel guilty about this, it feels like this technique breaks integrity (sitecore links table on database) and design pattern in Sitecore back-end.
For example when I look at Analytics, I get * as name of items, clearly the it feels like aliens to back-end system.
I know this is not a new topic. I have seen threads like this or ideas like Sitecore Pipeline Processor for Virtual Items to implement such requirements.
Is there any best practice about this? Have anyone good example of what is most sitecore-friendly way to implement such pipeline processor? How do you address this issue with wildcards on Analytics?
I'm going to go a different way to Martin here. I have successfully used Wildcards many times for the exact purpose you are suggesting (For an example have a look at http://www.atpworldtour.com/news - all news articles are items in a bucket with a wildcard to resolve the url).
There are 2 options to enabling the page editor.
The news article item becomes the page. In this way, you need a new processor in the httpRequestBegin pipeline that resolves the url to the item and then sets Sitecore.Context.Item to the current item. IIRC you do this by setting one of the pipeline argument properties. This will work fine in the page editor as the context item - the one being edited - is the news article. And then other renderings on the page can just use data sources as needed.
The news article resolves to a Datasource. I have also tried this method. To do this, you need a custom Datasource resolver. I sill used a processor in the httpRequestBegin pipeline so that I didn't have to resolve the Url multiple times for each rendering that needed the datasource. But then in the RenderRendering pipeline I had a processor that detected if I wanted a wildcard Datasource and used the item that had been resolved in the httpRequestBegin processor.
There are pros & cons for each method.
Option 1 is nice and simple. It means that you could use a single wildcard to resolve different "types" of page item as the presentation is on the page item and not the wildcard item, also each item can have its own custom presentation, so Datasources set in the page editor would be unique to an article. That is also a disadvantage in someways. A/B testing becomes more difficult with main article text etc... You are limited to testing article versions.
Option 2 is more flexible in the testing area - you can easily test/personalize parts of the article by changing the Datasource. But you are more limited as the presentation must be set on the wildcard. So renderings that are not part of the main article will have the same content/settings across all news articles.
I was previously in the same boat as you are. The are few issues with wildcard items, like resolving datasources or disability to run a page in Page(Experience) Editor or nested wildcards. Regardless of that, I have used wildcard few times and they do their job.
I've managed to resolve datasources properly, based on URL (see blog post: Automatically resolving correct Datasources for wildcard items based on URL), still did not sort the rest others.
Update: Richard suggests the way of implementing Page Editor below, you may find this helpful
Thus, my answer would be:
I would recommend you to keep classical approach of having a page item for each news item, rather than using wildcards. Content authors would use habitual approach (and page editor) rather that editing datasources somewhere on the content tree in Content Editor. If you configure that properly with templates and standard values - there would minimal hassle to create new news article.
In case if you worry about potential raise of number of news articles - use Buckets along with it (or suggest manual strategy to group them into folders).
I'm trying to understand the best approach to create article items in my sitecore 7.2 project.
Basically I'm considering 2 options:
1 - Create an article as a page;
2 - Create an article as a Site Data Item.
1 - Create article pages under a given page (i.e. My Articles). This way each article would have a specific URL out of the box, easier to understand in Content Authors' point of view;
2 - Have a specific folder (i.e. Article Folder) under Site Data. This way we don't need to have a page for each article - I was thinking to have a single Article page that would render the article fields. However this would require more work in terms of URLs, navigation, etc.
Is there any other ideas? Am I missing something? I was also having a look at Buckets...
Thank you
I'm going to disagree with Marek and recommend you opt for option 2.
Storing your articles in folder under a Data node allows those items to be datasourced. This is the principle Sitecore was built on. You can then surface those articles in a number of interesting ways via Widgets such as Promo Panels, prompting the user to click through to read about the article without duplicating its data and requiring Content Editors to manage data multiple times.
It even supports multiple sites, so the Articles can be used in other sites you may add to your Sitecore instance in the future.
As you state it will require extra work in terms of Urls and Navigation but it can be achieved via Sitecore's Wild Card Item and you an even use a great open sourced Module from Sitecore's Marketplace to complete 90% of the work for you. See links below for more information.
You can still implement Marek's point of applying Presentation Details once on the Standard Values of the Wild Cart Item you create. If you are using Sitecore 7 and above you can store all your articles in a Bucket so if you have lots of articles they are stored and searchable in a meaningful way.
http://www.sitecore.net/learn/blogs/technical-blogs/getting-to-know-sitecore/posts/2011/09/wildcards-and-data-driven-urls.aspx
https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Wildcard_module.aspx
In a standard one instance setup the easiest implementation is to create articles as pages.
In Sitecore you want to limit the items in a folder to 100 or less which is best practice to keep the content editors experience optimal.
This then leads you needing a folder structure and a couple options:
Manually maintain a folder structure for your articles. For example articles/year/month/day. This gives your editors the most control over the folder structure and allow them to navigate the articles in a more traditional way via a visible folder structure.
Use a bucket which automatically generates the folder structure and hides this complexity from the content editor. This takes the manual folder creation and maintenance away from the content editor and are automatically generated based on the configuration you set out for your bucket. The folders wont be visible to the content editor so they will be forced to search in the bucket for any articles rather then navigate the folders.
Use the shared source News mover module (https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/News_mover.aspx). This takes a different approach to the above. It works via a traditional folder structure however it generates folders and moves the item on save based on the date field in the article. So the news mover handles the generation of folders however you will still need to check your not exceeding 100 items per folder again for performance when opening folders with large amounts of items.
With all solutions you must still consider the URLs for your articles as they will include the folder structure by default. This is not always acceptable. I prefer to remove the folder structure from the URL. For this you need to create a custom linkProvider and a custom HttpRequestProcessor. Firstly the linkprovider allows you to ensure the new URL is always created and displayed in your site as you want. Next the HttpRequestProcessor ensures that when navigating to the shortened URL Sitecore recognises it as a valid URL and presents the correct page.
By excluding the folder structure from the URL it also adds the additional benefit that the URL is not dependent on the structure. This means editors can change that folder structure and not need to create redirect items to ensure SEO rankings or users bookmarks are not lost.
The cleaner data model is to use the wildcard approach for the URLs and centralize the storage of articles data in a bucket of datasources. This will give you optimum performance and reuse of the data.
However, this isn't how an author thinks about their website. When they use the system, they tend to navigate to the area where they would view articles and try to create a new one there. Authors tend to think in 'pages', so try to hide whatever data model you are using from them and give them the ability to edit the page with Experience Editor.
Some developers try to optimize too far and forget that the authoring experience is likely the most important piece of the delivered solution. The author doesn't care how efficiently you stored the data, only that they can edit it easily and publish efficiently. Whatever model supports that for your author base is how you should implement it.
My recommendation is a page-based approach where the author creates the URL structure with folders and items, something they understand. Then, if you really need to, you can have the primary article data be a datasource-driven component on the page. The user gets to use all the tools they are familiar with (Experience Editor,preview navigation) but you can still store the raw data in a centralized folder. You could then theoretically swap out the article data using DMS rules, or hide information based on authentication or membership status.
Go with approach 1: article is a page.
Define all your presentation details on Article Page template __Standard Values. All new articles will get them. And you can change some of the presentation details for your chosen articles if you want.
If you know that you'll have lot of articles, think about year/month/day folder structure, e.g. articles/2015/06/12.
Approach 2 doesn't give you anything - you still need to have an item for every article. And as you wrote, it would require additional coding which is not required.
I am building a brand new website in Sitecore and I am looking for advice on the following scenario:
My site has 2 version of its homepage. Both are quite different. The layout is the same, but most of the components and sublayouts on it will change depending on whether the user is logged in or not.
Does anybody has a suggestion of a good practice, or way to do that in Sitecore? My basic requirements are, have a single URL for both (the website root, it is a homepage) and do not harm the content author experience.
My thought so far was:
Use of personalization to control the components to be displayed (Concerns: performance and the content author experience he woudnt have to change component by component to see both versions)
Use of two item in the tree and intercept a pipeline to resolve the right item at the right time (Concerns: the content author would have two home items to maintain *not actually a big problem)
Does anybody has any other approach or considerations on those I listed?
Thanks
An alternative solution would be to make use of devices, and use a pipeline to switch devices if the user is logged in.
Set up your Device in Sitecore to use the default layout as a fallback so it does not affect other pages in your site (and they continue to work as expected). You are then able to set different sublayouts and components for that Item (directly or in Standard Values for the template) for each device. You can make use the VaryByDevice caching option to make better use of the Cache.
Your content editors can also switch between the devices easily in the Page Editor from the ribbon. Any further customization you need in other areas of the site, such has switching out a single component, can be run using a Personlization Rule taking advantage of "where the current device compares to value".
It does sound like you have the need for personalization based on authenticated status, so I would recommend staying with the built-in personalization interface to avoid confusion. Authors will have been trained during Sitecore training on how to use personalization, and introducing an alternative method for accomplishing the same thing could lead to a less-than-optimal experience for the author.
To address your concern of the author needing to view components by toggling each one, I would recommend installing the Experience Explorer module. You can create presets that meet your rules on your presentation and then the author can preview the site for different 'experiences'.
If you have a single URL for the home page, it is more straight-forward to go with a single item, so I would definitely advise against having two home page items that are being resolved by the same URL.
You mentioned a concern for performance, so I would recommend you making sure that you enable your sublayout caching settings. In your case, varying by Data may be the way to go, given you would personalize with two sets of datasources.
In the past I have used the following crude technique:
Make two components, one for "logged in" and the other for anonymous.
Each rendering has just one line, a single placeholder, either:
<sc:placeholder key="logged-in" runat="server" />
or
<sc:placeholder key="anonymous" runat="server" />
For "logged in" I make a personalisation rule which hides the component if anonymous, and for the anonymous component I make a personalisation rule which hides the component if the user is logged in.
I then nest all the components under the correct placeholder key.
So I am rather new to sitecore, and it's a topic that wasn't covered during my training. My questions is just to help point me to the correct term, or documentation on a method to do the following.
I have a definition item, with a ton of field groups, what I want to do is something like:
if Value of Field X is "yes" then collapse/hide Field X or Field Group X.
Does that make sense? Is it a validation rule? or some other kind of rules, is it a workflow I need to attach? Do you place it on just the field I want to hide, or the field that triggers the action?
I appreciate any guidance.
There is nothing out-of-the-box in Sitecore to achieve what you want but there is no reason you cannot create a composite custom field type to do this. The following articles will help you achieve this:
Creating a custom Sitecore Field
Getting to Know Sitecore: Custom Fields, Part 1
Create a new control, inheriting either from Droplist (if the comparison of the value is to be text based) or Droplink (for comparison of ID). You could add a parameter in the Source field of the control to specify what the values that trigger the hide should be.
The underlying control in the Content Editor is just a standard HTML select element. Add onchange events to the control and add your Javascript handler to hide the other controls. Since I could not find a way of adding additional custom css classes to the Sitecore controls, it would be best/easiest to hide all other controls in the same collapsible group after you control. This would mean you would need to group your controls better (or logically at least).
The Javascript will be something like this (the Content Editor uses the Prototype JS framework):
if ($(this).getValue() == 'no') {
// find the parent container of this control and then hide all the next siblings in the same group
$(this).up('.scEditorFieldMarker').nextSiblings('.scEditorFieldMarker').invoke('hide');
}
You can test this by running the above in the console, change out the keyword this with the id of your field, e.g. $('FIELD2292054').
What I am not sure about is how to trigger the hide on initial load, i.e. when someone returns to an existing item, it may be possible by adding to one of the pipelines, but would be better using a JS solution if possible. I'll have a think about this and get a proper code sample up over the next few days.
EDIT: You can add an event handler to sc:contenteditorupdated to handle the content editor being rel-oaded.
document.observe("sc:contenteditorupdated", myFunction);
I wrote up a blog post and put the code on GitHub if you are interested.
Not sure if you have come across Andy Uzick's this blog post.
He wisely talks about hiding fields in the Content Editor and has also created a Sitecore Module called Hide Field Template Extension which is hosted on the Sitecore Marketplace with the full source code to extend.
After reading through and trying the extension, I do feel that it will not completely resolve your issue (how you have described it in the question).
But it will give you:
A mid-term solution to hide a few unnecessary field that some content editors would not like to view.
Fields that are only required by administrators for admin purpose - to de-clutter these fields could be hidden.
Just one thing to bear in mind that it mentions in the requirements Sitecore 6.5 & 6.6. I have not tested it in Sitecore 7. If you are using Sitecore 7, which I think you are, one could modify the source code and make it work for Sitecore 7.
Have a look and share your findings.
Happy Sitecoring!