Using CKeditor is it possible to create a template, and only let users edit certain elements in it while keeping the structure intact?
For example a header, a subtext, a paragraph and list of items. But they mustn't delete any of these or add other elements.
The use case is that users have to create a bunch of documents that has to look a certain way. They aren't allowed to veer from the standard layouts.
Or is that use case beyond the scope of the editor?
I can't seem to find examples of this in their documentation.
The alternative could be to create custom forms in html on the left side of the page and simultaneously update a "read only" document on the right side of the page so that they can "preview" the final document in CKeditor.
Though just letting users edit a "locked" template would be a smoother experience.
-Thanks in Advance
Have a look at widgets. Online demo of a sample widget (explained in a tutorial) with predefined structure is available here: http://sdk.ckeditor.com/samples/simplebox.html
Related
I am creating a Sitecore MVC site for a client and I need to create page that will list news articles for the company.
So far, I have created items that use a shared data template called “Article,” and I also have a sublayout (a view rendering) called “Article” that will display these items.
For the list itself, my plan was to create another component (a sublayout) call “News_List”, and to put a placeholder in it called “List”.
My question is this: can I allow the author to insert articles (e.g., N items of type “Article”) into this placeholder via the page editor?
Will SC allow you to insert multiple instances of the same component into a placeholder? Will this break anything?
I believe this is a pretty common question but I have not found a definitive answer. Thanks in advance…!
You can insert as many components (of the same type) in your placeholder as you want.. Just make sure to put the placeholder settings correctly and give it a decent name (not just "list" ;))
But are you sure you want to do this? Your editors will manually need to create a list of components for each article they want to add on the page. Doesn't sound to be very user (editor) friendly.. Maybe you should consider creating a list component that can get a list of articles as a datasource and show those. Or even select them automatically (but that might be not according to your business case)..
Yes, authors can add multiple instances of the same component into a single placeholder.
Assuming that the code of the component doesn't do any stupid things it's absolutely ok to do this.
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.
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!
Im a little newbie working with Aplication Express, I want to create an aplication which its structure could be something like this example.
http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=36648:1:110593396161288::NO
Anyone have some ideas to create it?
I just tried creating a List from Shared Components and then set it in a region with Page Region Template Position 3 and another Chart Region with Page Template Body (3), but in my case the side bar is placed on the right when I want it on the left... I have tried all the Template Position combination as possible.
Also when I click a value from the list, the page is opened on another tab. How can I open it on a specific region? As a frame for example
Any help will be greatly appreciated
Having a left sidebar depends on the page template you select. Some page templates will have a left sidebare, other a right one, others maybe both. And since templates are part of a theme, it may be that some templates under some themes may not have a page template that offers what you'd want.
So the first you need to do is look at what page templates you have available in your chosen theme. You can do this by going to the Shared Components and selecting templates from there. Scroll to the Page Templates and see if you can find one there.
While it's a good guess that the sidebart region will be in position 3, and position 3 is in the sidebar, it's best to verify. You can do that by checking the html of the body of the template. See if there is a region assigned to a sidebar. You'll have to divine this from the markup or an example page and which one it is (position 2? position 3? 4?).
Pro-tip: from the Shared Components > Templates, in the report overview, you can preview certain types of templates, such as the page template. Just hit the preview button and you'll get a general idea of the style and the region positioning! When viewing the template in detail, you can also preview from the preview link in the right hand menu list.
As for the list: the example you linked has a list region on the left sidebar, but all those links are links to other pages. Thus, there are as many pages as there are links in the list.
If on your environment the links are causing a new page or tab to be opened up, then that likely means the attribute target="_blank" is present on those anchor tags. Again though, this just means that that markup is being generated by the chosen list template. Try another list template (by editing the list, under Source you can chose the template) or take a look at the theme's templates. You can find the markup for the individual list items there.
It'd be better not to concern yourself too much by trying to fiddle around with iframes just yet, because even though that'd be possible it is not an out of the box feature. Unless you're already really familiar with eg javascript I'd stick to page links until you're more familiar with the environment.
Currently working in SC7 where I have implemented a kind of scaffolding so that editors can add an article to a page and add sections and paragraphs under it. You get the idea, html5 stuff...
Now, the problem...
Editors are working in Page Editor:
Suppose you make a new page, and add an article. It has a title, hero image on top and an introduction. You choose to create new content and I save it in an ItemBucket called ContenStore where I store all my articles, sections, paragraphs... The SC7 way to use the search if they want to re-use any of that content.
Suppose my editor creates another new page, and he wants to re-use a section from the content store. He will find the section but when he has placed it on the page, non of the paragraphs that were on the original section show up... Of course not, since I guess the layout details are saved on the context item level and not on that section level...
Has anyone tackled this problem before? A sublayout (or rendering) should be able to remeber what layout details it has, so that if you re-use it, all the items it had originally are put in its placeholders again as well, and this recursively of course...
Any thoughts welcome...
Erwin
The problem you describe is not new to Sitecore 7. You would have the same problem in Sitecore 6, you would just have to go through the additional effort of keeping your content organized. This is a fundamental limitation of Sitecore's presentation framework.
I have worked around similar problems before by using Presentation Inversion of Control. (I should probably write an update for that since the rules engine approach no longer works)
I believe that Cognifide is doing something similar with the "Composites" in their Zen Garden, but instead of using a dummy layout they use an empty layout so any item can be opened as a page. Then they added a custom experience button which navigates to that non-page content item within the page editor. (Note that this is speculation based on a brief demo that I saw).
Thomas Eldblom also blogged years ago about what he called Composite Layouts. It's similar to PIoC, but puts the presentation settings on a special rendering type.
In short, there are ways to achieve what you want, but they all involve custom development and will require extra attention to maintain a smooth page editor experience.