I am fairly new to Orchard, really impressed with what I have seen so far.
My question:
I have a site that uses blogs fairly heavily as content. On the homepage, there are the following widgets:
'featured' - a blog post that has a featured field (query)
'latest' - a list of blog posts, sorted by date (blog archives)
The featured post will have an image heavy design (while hiding things like post time/number of comments/tags/etc) while the latest posts will be a fairly traditional layout (showing the aforementioned fields). As such, these widgets, which are the same base type, need to have very different structures.
I have figured out how to access the individual widgets, the overall blog post and each of the individual parts of the blog posts, however I cannot figure out what level I should be creating a view at, to be able to style these individually.
At the content level, I have a reasonable amount of control (still reliant on the #Display(Model.Content) though) however, none of the alternates I can see in Shape Tracer will allow me to ONLY change the Content-BlogPost.cshtml (or similar) for the particular Widget or Zone (both would allow access).
What I really need is to be able to specify the zone AND the content area. (something like Zone-ZoneName-Content-BlogPost.cshtml)
Am I missing something important? or am I going about this completely wrong?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Nick
(apologies for cross posting from codeplex, has been a few days and I really need to progress)
Related
One of my colleague left on vacation and left me with an Orchard project to work on.
I never worked with Orchard, so please excuse my ignorance and my possibly stupid questions.
I come to you for general advice on how to implement and structure the content of my site, as my research didn't give me the answers I'm looking for.
Here are the requirements:
The site must be divided into sections (section A, section A-1, section A-2, section B, etc...)
The navigation of the site must be based on the sections, each navigation item must also contain an image
Each section has a separate page with roughly 4 types of content that must be displayed:
Title of the page
Articles associated with this section, which represent the main content
FAQ content associated with the section which should be displayed in a specific zone
Miscellaneous content associated with the section which should also be displayed in a specific zone
I'm struggling at nearly every aspect of the requirements...
We started building a taxonomy, with as many terms as we have sections, allowing us to build the hierarchy we want, which is perfect. But this had 2 downsides:
The built-in taxonomy-based navigation is static, so the only thing displayed is the term, and we couldn't find a way to change it so the user would be able to add an image to the taxonomy term.
The generated pages based on the taxonomy display every content item based on the current term, that is, the articles, but also the FAQ content and the miscellaneous content, all in the Content zone.
Is there any way to work around these issues by using the built-in taxonomy? Or will I have to build content types from scratch in order to achieve what I'm trying?
The solution my colleague came up with was to add a layer for each section, and add in this layer 3 widgets, one for each specific content (title, FAQ, misc) in different zones. But I don't think this will me maintainable, as we currently have 4 main sections, each with 4-5 subsections, so that's rougly 60 layers, which will be a nightmare for the client to maintain.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated, I'm kind of lost.
Thanks in advance,
Mickaël
Taxonomies was a good start, but now you need to study projections. You'll be able to set-up filters about what you display.
For adding an image to your terms, one way to do it is to add a media library picker field to the type that was created for your taxonomy.
I am kind of new to SharePoint. I am learning it on the go and learned about the concept of pagelayout and publishing features on the site. But I am not really 100% sure what is the difference between a WebPartPage, SitePage and PublishingPage. I kind of know what all these pages be used for, but what I not get is: why do they need to separate all these pages?
I think we can just get a publishing page and have all the feature there including webpart and everything else (with our choice of PageLayout). However I dont see a way to use a pagelayout on a particular SitePage.
Is there any particular reasons for using either one of them? Even though it seems like one of them can serve as all of them?
You should use page layout when ever you know the page structure. For example you are running an online news paper. You want to show the news to the users into three columns. First column is for menu, second column is for news content and third column is for advertisements. Now in your daily usage this layout is common. So you can use this page layout for entering the news. After creating the page layout you can make it as a default to your pages. Page layout is nothing but the structure of a page simply!!
A webpart page does not have a field for content directly on the page like a SitePage has. A Publishing Page is like a SitePage, but requires extra fields for dealing with the publishing extra features.
Using a single layout for all three risks being confused as to why one page does not work the same as another when it has the same layout (the difference would be the underlying features are different.).
I will make a comparison with cars. There are three type of cars, each is better suitable for a certain purpose: tractors for farming, buses for public transport, light cars for private transport. You could use a tractor for all the purposes above but it's not ideal.
"One of them can serve as all of them". This is not true in their current implementation. I'll give you one example: prefer Web part pages against Publishing pages to better control content added by contributors in an intranet. There are many other examples.
After having followed the instructions to "unabridge" blog posts in Orchard, I'd now like to separate the blog post date and comment-count, so that the date appears ahead of the blog post, and the comment-count appears after. How would that be done?
Even better, I'd additionally like to have the comment-count be a hyper link to the blog post detail. How would that be done?
To do this and many other similar things, you should enable shape tracing (it comes as part of the designer tools module). This will show you what template is rendering what, and also where they are positioned. It will also tell you what templates you can create in your theme to override behavior. The Model tab in particular will show you the whole model object graph and will give you the expression to put in your template to include any property into your markup.
You know, the publishing suite offers other content than forum. for example blogs and also some custom content
i know how to add articles/widgets to the page itself, but how do i add such a thing into a forum secion?
for example, on the left column i would have forums and on the right column i would have some news reader widget
could someone help?
Maybe it is enough for you to enable the "forum sidebar" in the admincp.
admincp->Settings->Options->Forum Sidebar and Block Options->Enable Forum Sidebar=YES.
Now you can add custom blocks with HTML and PHP.
For vBulletin 3.x, the solution is to edit the appropriate templates (FORUMDISPLAY, SHOWTHREAD, etc). I can't be much more specific than that, I'm afraid, since the exact details will vary depending on what kind of modifications you've already made to your templates and the exact details of the widgets you wish to insert.
A client is asking to incorporate commenting on their news articles. They're using the Sharepoint news site template for their news publishing, etc. They want a simple commenting system, much like what is available on most blog engines, only they want it at the bottom of each news article.
I just thought I would ask around about an out of the box solution before I go quoting a custom dev solution. Thanks in advance!
I struggled with this a while back and the solution we found was to use a discussion borad list (out of the box) and we created a custom web part that we added to the page layout for news.
We had to do som trickery to add support for anonymous comments, but on the whole it works good and wasen't to much code.
The Community Kit for SharePoint does the whole commenting thing for blogs.
you may have to cut out the commenting part of it to get it to work with your news section however.
The commenting section of the Enhanced Blog Edition of CKS does to approval of comments and spam checking.
I had the same request. I didn't find an existing solution, so I did it by copying from the standard Blog site template, plus custom coding.
From the template: Copy the definition for the blog comments list. Remove the lookup fields, and use a feature to create the list on all publishing sites.
Custom code: Add a feature receiver to the comments feature, and use it to add the lookup fields for page id and title, (using the pages list as destination). This needs to be done in code because you can't configure the destination list for lookup fields in XML, (or at least I don't know how).
Write controls for querying the comments list and adding to it, and place on the page layout.
Simpler approach: Don't use the standard blog comments list, just create your own, where the page reference is just a number and not a lookup field. Pro: Less work. Con: You miss out on the views that come with the standard list.