Custom Zone on Alternative Content View in Orchard 1.7 - orchardcms

I have the requirement to create a different structure for the homepage of my Orchard site.
I learnt that if you use layer 'TheHomepage', when you are rendering the homepage the widgets get run and the relevant Model.[ZoneName] property is set with the Zone (or shape or whatever it is, not got that far) that gets passed to Layout.cshtml.
So far so good, now what I want is that I want to only have these custom zones on my homepage. So I have added the following zones for testing:
HomeMagazine_1 and HomeMagazine_2
When I attach a widget to these zones, and I am on the homepage the widgets get run, and I can see the Model.HomeMagazine_1 and Model.HomeMagazine_2 on the Model passed to the Layout.cshtml.
My issue is that I want a custom page to render these zones. So I have added a new view:
Content-url-homepage.cshtml
Where I am rendering the zones:
<div class="container">
#if (Model.HomeMagazine_1 != null)
{
#Zone(Model.HomeMagazine_1)
}
However the issue is that the Model that gets passed into Content-url-homepage.cshtml is a ZoneHolding that has no HomeMagazine_1 property.
I understand the reason for this, what I am asking is how to acheive what I have illustrated, is there any way to get to the Layout.cshtml ZoneHolding. I'm unsure because the Layout.cshtml is executed after Content-url-homepage.cshtml.
Enjoying working with Orchard but it does throw some interesting blockades up sometimes!

I have found that I can use:
Layout.HomeMagazine_1
Which has the intended effect. I shall mark this as the answer when I can unless anyone has a better suggestion on how to achieve this.

Related

Can I render all zones to an HTML string in a controller method

I'm trying to render the HTML for a content item to a string from within a controller action. Technically I just want to get the "body" part of it without any header/footer stuff. I want to do this so I can get a content item rendering the way I want once, and then display it as a normal orchard page OR by requesting the HTML for the content item via ajax to display it in a div in a JavaScript app. I don't want to have to manually render everything in the JavaScript as that would be duplicating the layout logic I already did. I want to re-use the bulk of the server side rendering so any changes are reflected in my normal orchard page and my JavaScript page. I've been digging into the code and searching everywhere and have gotten close but not all the way there.
I found these:
How to render shape to string?
Using FindView in Orchard
In my controller I have:
var shape = _contentManager.BuildDisplay(contentItem);
Using either of the two methods above, I can render that shape to an HTML string in my controller. All was golden. I was getting the body of that page and using it in JS. Then, I changed a placement file:
<Place Parts_Common_Body="Content:1" />
was changed to:
<Place Parts_Common_Body="/AsideFirst:1" />
The body moved where I wanted it (AsideFirst) in my normal Orchard page but disappeared from the HTML retrieved using the two methods above.
If I look at shape.Content.Items after the BuildDisplay call, I can see the item for the body is no longer there... why is it not rendering all the zones? Or, I guess a more specific question is why is the BuildDisplay method not building the complete shape? Is there a way I can make this work?
I tried a million different things and eventually got this working. Not sure I totally get it yet, but I think the problem had to do with the fact that I was using shape.Content and I'd moved stuff out of the Content zone. And maybe when I was looking at what the BuildDisplay method was returning I was just not looking at some newly created zone that actually did had the stuff I thought was missing. Clearly I need to learn more about zones and shapes... Anyway, I have a new zone called "MainInfo" now that I created in a placement file. I get a MainInfo property on the main shape returned form BuildDisplay and pass shape.MainInfo to the view rendering code and all seems to be working well now.

How to create Layout Based on Layer in Orchard

I am trying to create a different layout for a sub-section of my website using Orchard.
Let's say I wanted to give www.site.com/Shop a different layout from the rest of the website; how would I go about doing this?
I have tried looking for a way to do this using layers but have got stuck.
There are several ways to achieve different layout, since I don't know your specific needs I'll throw in some extra possible routes
Use url shape alternate (I guess you need this one)
You have to enable Url Alternates module and it lets you create shape alternates based on url. For example if your page is www.site.com/shop you can then create view under your theme Layout-url-Shop.cshtml and it will be used instead of default Layout.cshtml on your shop.
Orchard documentantion: URL and Widget Alternates
Use 1.x or wait for 1.9
There you can define dynamically different layout per content item aka page. But I find it good only for content not the base layout which is present in layout.cshtml
Create minisite
How to create a minisite inside your Orchard website

Orchard CMS 100% unthemed html page

We have a requirement to use the content zone of Orchard CMS to enter in html for a full screen landing page. We managed to get an unthemed page type using the Downplay.Orchard.Layout selector. The problem is that in using the content zone orchard automatically wraps html, head and body tags around it. We want to remove this content so we essentially have a blank page to start off with and then we can create our own html to display on the landing page. Is this possible to do for a single page and if so what would be the best way to do this?
You can have a URL alternate or you can use the new Disable Template part (1.8, i think)
I have done lots of URL alternates in the past. Pretty easy.
Just remembered, a question like this: Using Alternatives for Document.cshtml in Orchard CMS
removing the Wrapper (Document.cshtml) from your (Layout-url-...) and adding a new one, should do the trick.
And it might be better to use the placement.info, but thats my opinion...
Suppressing Wrappers and Placement.info

Orchard CMS create theme view for my content type

I am using orchard cms with the bootstrap theme.
I have created a content type: House
it contains FIELDS
image (media picker field)
Property Type (taxonomy field)
Location (taxonomy field)
It has PARTS
common
body
publish later
Title
Autoroute
I want queries of houses and be able to choose the view/ layout for them
e.g. layout called HouseList (for sidebars mainly) which will render: title, image and link to house, possible location and type but with out the links as defaulted. And then a fullDetails layout and a image only layout (so i can show a jquery image reel a widget say in a quadzone) How can i do all this please, i have tried in view Content-House.cshtml etc but i cant access the details model.content to choose what to display.
Im sure when i get the idea of how to do 1 i should be able to sort the rest. I have read documentation etc but there are so many different ways, ie placement file, change the parts, contents, create classes to handle display etc. sureley i am missing something simple like create a view for each list i want eg. houue-list, house-details, house-imageONly and then manipulate content.
Please help i have been trying different things for getting this site running for weeks and not getting very far. Examples would be fantastic but i have searched google for hours and found similar but nothing with enough details for a meer beginer.
Thanks
The standard way of doing that is placement to move things around and alternate templates for the different parts and fields. You can specialize placement and alternates with the display type, which is Summary when rendering in a list such as what a projection returns, and Detail for the detail view. More info on placement can be found here: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Understanding-placement-info and on alternates here: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Alternates
Now if you prefer to completely take over the rendering and do without placement, here are a few posts that may help:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2011/07/31/so-you-don-t-want-to-use-placement-info.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2011/03/27/taking-over-list-rendering-in-orchard.aspx

Overriding Core Shapes - Orchard CMS

I currently have a Content Type called "News" which is very simple (No custom properties etc.). I am trying to style this Content type when it occurs on a page of a specific layout, in this case a "News" page.
So - I have the layout that a News page will inherit from (Layout-url-News.cshtml), however I cannot seem to get the Content to display or inherit from a template (I have tried creating alternates such as Zone-url-News.cshtml and Zone-Content-url-News.cshtml, however both result in having no content at all.)
I had create both of the mentioned alternates by hand, as Designer Tools was unable to generate an alternate (The relative virtual path 'Orchard.Core.Shapes.CoreShapes::Zone' is not allowed here)
Basically - I cannot figure out how to style the content found on a specific page, (Title, Tags, Date, Body) as the Content always seems to inheirit from the base shape.
If your point is to style content in a zone, u might find it easier to use css. The layout system makes it really easy to identify the elements your interested in styling by using css selectors.
for example
.aside1.news { ... }
That takes care of 80% of styling needs
Most of the remaining is taken care of by the placement.info file which allows you to indicate which fields and what order for contenttypes and viewstypes (summary and detail)
the remaining needs are address by overriding the contentitem.view.
But you seem to indicate that you want to set the style for a contenttype in a specific zone for a url. So... You have the same contentType in different zones at the same url? I cannot imagine what you are doing. :)
Long and short, it sounds like your focused on the zone but it might be more helpful to focus on the contenttype or better yet, css. I ran into the same thing with url alternates suggesting alternates that aren't valid. It seems weird that it suggests zone alternates. I don't think those those are allowed.

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