I have several pages with static data, like About Us etc... Basically there's nothing dynamic about this pages... And my question is: how to implement these pages? I know I could add Pages to Pages list, and then copy/paste markup to body. But for me it would be more convienient to use MVC approach, where controller simply returns a:
return View();
from the action, and I have all my markup in cshtml file. Is it possible? If so, is it correct approach?
Yes it's possible. You just have to return a Shape with your custom content in an action marked as Themed. But I don't think that this is the correct approach. Why not just add pages? You could put HTML in the body section or even attach a custom part with the html (if you don't want to use a body part)
Related
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.
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
I'm trying to create a CSS documentation library in Orchard. I want to save a description, CSS snippet and HTML snippet against each content type. The first view would show the description and CSS and HTML code written out. The second view would show a preview of what the CSS and HTML look like rendered.
cssdocumentation.com/content/item1
cssdocumentation.com/content/item1/live-preview
I've created the content type and the first view. But I'm not sure how to create the second view. I can see if I can create the alternative URL I can use the Url Alternates module to create an overriding .cshtml
To create an alternative URL I've looked at the autoroute module but this only allows you to adapt a single URL (unless I'm missing something?) and I've looked at Alias UI but this forces me to manually create an alternative URL everytime I create a content item.
Is this possible in Orchard without writting too much C#? (I'm a frontend developer so I only dabble in the behind the scenes stuff)
Thanks for any help
Best solution is to do this within your own module. But as a secondary option instead of having a second page, combine this content with your first page and hide it with CSS. When the user clicks a button to navigate to the next step render the CSS/HTML result on the same page. You can do this in many ways, here are a few ideas:
Render the CSS/HTML result out straight away on the same page but hide it. Show it when the user clicks a button
using jQuery to render the result on the client side. More dynamic if you allow editing of the HTML and CSS.
Redirecting the user to the same page with specific url parameters which you can pick up in your alternate to modify the output.
I am using drupal.I have to display the content of a page in lightbox2.(only the content not header,footer,menubar,sidebar etc).The url of that content node is http://mysite.com/node/1.
I have included the lightbox2 module and used the below code
<li>click here to see node content</li>
But the lightbox displays the whole page not only the content.i need only the text content.
One more option in that you can pass a parameter in get method for lightbox2 content.
Based on the parameter add condition in page.tpl.php
Not the best of the solution, but achievable.
Create a new page.tpl for node/1 and print only $content in this.
this way you will make sure you only get content and nothing else
I Agree with Vaibhav Jain, you can create a theme for the page without the header, left and right, footer. only the content and call that page inside the lightbox
In asp.net webpages framework what is the difference between using a content block versus a helper?
They both seem to be used to output HTML to multiple pages. They both can contain code and both can pass parameters.
Are there other differences? When should you use a helper versus a content block?
More info:
With Content Blocks we create a .cshtml (for example _MakeNote.cshtml) file to hold the content we want to insert into a page. Then we use:
#RenderPage("/Shared/_MakeNote.cshtml")
to insert the content into a page. We can pass parameters to the content block like this:
#RenderPage("/Shared/_MakeNote.cshtml", new { content = "hello from content block" })
It's somewhat like an include file, but I think does not share scope with the parent page.
With Helpers we create a .cshtml page in the App_Code folder (for example MyHelpers.cshtml) and place methods in that page which we want to call. The method looks something like this:
#helper MakeNote(string content) {
<div>#content</div>
}
The helper is called by using:
#MyHelpers.MakeNote("Hello from helper")
There isn't a lot of difference functionally. Helpers need to go into an App_Code folder - unless you download VWD or Visual C# Express and compile a binary - and the App_Code folder doesn't translate well to the MVC framework. Of course, that's only relevant if you want to upgrade to MVC at some point.
I would use a helper for generic functional snippets like your MakeNote. I would use a "content-block" (partial, really) for repeated site-specific sections of a page.