Hello fellow Orcharders!
I'm not sure if what I want to do is possible, but I want to override the Driver for a single Field in the Module I'm writing.
The Field I want more control over is the Content Picker field. Basically I want the Content Picker to load the shapes for their respective content items. I've looked at Sipke's Content Picker Widget for an example on how to load shapes, however I'm unsure of the best/recommended approach to implement something similar in my module.
I have the Content Picker Field attached to my Content Part, and the default Content Picker comma list of Content Item titles appears as expected. I have tried to define an Alternate in Placement.info, but I can't load the Content Item shapes from within the Alternate view.
Presumably, as per Sipke's example, these shapes need to be built in the Driver and passed along. If this is correct thing to do, how could I do this in the most Orchard-y way with minimal "hacks". Looking into the debugger, I could "hack" my way to the Field I need in my part's Driver; but the module I'm building will be reused in the future by people unfamiliar with it, and if they start adding/deleting Fields from the Content Part, I'd like everything to behave accordingly!
Of course, if I must take the "hacky" option, I'm willing to do so, but only after I've exhausted all other options. This is my first module, and I've learnt an incredible amount along the way, and I'm really trying to learn the "right" way to build an Orchard Module as best I can.
Thanks in advance!
Related
I want to create a custom value picker which can have:
Same labels
Can't use simple Domino view value picker as I need to check individual entry for some business criteria
I want to show a short summary as well to help user distinguish among similar labels (I want to add some formatting to it e.g. label in bold, summary in green small chars)
I can create an Xpage for all such value pickers or I can have a custom data provider. Now, my question is, do I need to create a custom renderer as well to display Label with summary? How do I implement the picker with modal look-n-feel (I am using bootstrap theme)?
Thanks in advance
Arun
Version 12 of the Extension Library included the code I contributed for Map Picker Data Provider and Collection Picker Data Provider. Implementing data provider outside the Extension Library packages is quite complicated - there are a lot of methods used for getting options etc that are protected, so they need reproducing. They're currently designed to take a label and value only, so they would need extending to take a summary as well.
I don't think the picker can take HTML as a picker option - that would allow you to pass in the formatting for the label and the summary. I've not tried it, but if it was allowed it would impact searching etc, so that makes me suspect it's unlikely.
Creating a renderer with bootstrap look and feel is possible. I'd recommend looking at the Extension Library renderers. It looks like the picker renderers handle the link on the page and separate classes handle the dialog that's displayed.
I'm relatively new to Expression Engine, and as I'm learning it I am seeing some stuff missing that WordPress has had for a while. A big one for me is shortcodes, since I will use these to allow CMS users to place more complex content in place with their other content.
I'm not seeing any real equivalent to this in EE, apart from a forthcoming plugin that's in private beta.
As an initial test I'm attempting to fake shortcodes by using delimited strings (e.g. #foo#) in the content field, then using a regex to pull those out and pass them to a function that can retrieve the content out of EE's database.
This brings me to a second question, which is that in looking at EE's API docs, there doesn't appear to be a simple means of retrieving the channel entries programmatically (thinking of something akin to WP's built-in get_posts function).
So my questions are:
a) Can this be done?
b) If so, is my method of approaching it reasonable? Or is there something stupidly obvious I'm missing in my approach?
To reiterate, my main objective here is to have some means of allowing people managing content to drop a code in place in their content that will be replaced with channel content.
Thanks for any advice or help you can give me.
Here's a simple example of the functionality you're looking for.
1) Start by installing Low Replace.
2) Create two Global Variables called gv_hello and gv_goodbye with the values "Hello" and "Goodbye" respectively.
3) Put this text into the body of an entry:
[say_hello]
Nice to see you.
[say_goodbye]
4) Put this into your template, wrapping the Low Replace tag around your body field.
{exp:low_replace
find="[say_hello]|[say_goodbye]"
replace="{gv_hello}|{gv_goodbye}"
multiple="yes"
}
{body}
{/exp:low_replace}
5) It should output this into your browser:
Hello
Nice to see you.
Goodbye
Obviously, this is a really simple example. You can put full blown HTML into your global variable. For example, we've used that to render a complex, interactive graphic that isn't editable but can be easily dropped into a page by any editor.
Unfortunately, due to parse order issues, EE tags won't work inside Global Variables. If you need EE tags in your short code output, you'll need to use Low Variables addon instead of Global Variables.
Continued from the comment:
Do you have examples of the kind of shortcodes you want to support/include? Because i have doubts if controlling the page-layout from a text-field or wysiwyg-field is the way to go.
If you want editors to be able to adjust layout or show/hide extra parts on the page, giving them access to some extra fields in the channel, is (imo) much more manageable and future-proof. For instance some selectfields, a relationship (or playa) field, or a matrix, to let them choose which parts to include/exclude on a page, or which entry from another channel to pull content from.
As said in the comment: i totally understand if you want to replace some #foo# tags with images or data from another field (see other answers: nsm-transplant, low_replace). But, giving an editor access to shortcodes and picking them out, is like writing a template-engine to generate ee-template code for the ee-template-engine.
Using some custom fields to let editors pick and choose parts to embed is, i think, much more manageable.
That being said, you could make a plugin to parse the shortcodes from a textareas content, and then program a lot, to fetch data from other modules you want to support. For channel entries you could build out of the channel data library by objectiveHTML. https://github.com/objectivehtml/Channel-Data
I hear you, I too miss shortcodes from WP -- though the reason they work so easily there is the ubiquity of the_content(). With the great flexibility of EE comes fewer blanket solutions.
I'd suggest looking at NSM Transplant. It should fit the bill for you.
There is also a plugin called Shortcode, which you can find here at
Devot-ee
A quote from the page:
Shortcode aims to allow for more dynamic use of content by authors and
editors, allowing for injection of reusable bits of content or even
whole pieces of functionality into any field in EE
I need to divide long content to sub-pages.
Rule for dividing: Heading1 (H1)
Cms-system: MODX Evolution
As far as i know, there is nothing in modx to use for this kind of problem.
I probably got to do this manually anyway, but i still would like to know if there is a way to do this in MODX Evo / Revo.
Edit:
I need to do this in MODX; sub-pages got to be actual subpages, and original page becomes to container.
Navigation will be done with wayfinder.
Edit2:
All done.. manually. Question still open, though.
This is not possible out of the box and I don't know of any extra that archieves what you want. You would have to write a plugin that acts everytime you save a resource and split up the content, create/delete sibling resources as needed etc. Sounds like a lot of work for what you want to archieve to me.
I suppose you have a look at the MIGX extra. It provides you with a TV with the possibility to store an indefinite amount of distinct TV content sets. Have a look at the documentation and Mark Hamstra's tutorial (with screenshots) to see how it is done. You should define one MIGX entry to consist of a text field for the <h1> and a rich text field for the content of the "subpage".
Afterwards, you can use form customization to hide the original content field and display your MIGX Tv instead.
I think, this is a much easier way to archieve, what you want, and can't think of any way, where you would benefit from actual subpages.
Edit: Sorry, I just recognized that you were asking about Evolution, not Revolution. My solution would work in Revo, but I don't think there's something like MIGX for Evo. Sorry, my mistake.
not 'out of the box' you will have to run your content through a snippet to parse it into separate divs or something that you can run some javascript on to possibly 'tab' the content.
If you need to show the 'subpages' in your navigation, you will probably have to use the gatResources extra to parse your content ~ which will be very expensive on resource usage.
You can (depending on how you're using the tree) just create actual sub resources under the parent resource, using Ditto or Wayfinder to build navigation for it.
If you can't use the tree like that (though from your description I think you can), you could also set up a number of template variables ("content1", "content2", "content3" etc) and show that with a simple snippet or so.
I would like to know if it is possible to use kentico macros (not necessarily coding a custom one) to access part of the rewritten URL's Path.
Example: http://www.mysite.com/Category/Subcategory/
I would like to get the last part (Subcategory) so that I may then filter content dynamically. The reason I want to use the macro is to simply not have to have 20+ different page templates only so I can have different web part properties.
Assuming you are using Portal templates, and you don't want an 'all items in all subcategories' list on the parent:
Create an Article List web part on the parent page — parent to all the sub-categories.
Set the web part Path to /{0}/{1}/{2}/% (if your path was /Home/Parent/Subcategory for example) or something similar for your environment.
Use the default setting of Inherit for the page template for all subcategory pages.
This will not show anything on the parent page, and the sub-categories will show only the documents under themselves. Note: If you want the subcategory items to have their own views when user digs down to /{0}/{1}/{2}/item, you may need to filter by changing template inheritance, or Document Types on the web part, or something like that if you don't want the whole sub-category list to also show on the item-specific pages.
You can create a custom macro or, you can also use the string operations which are allowed within macros. Please see http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/6_0/devguide/available_macro_methods.htm#string_methods (and you can e.g. use the EndsWith or TrimStrart or something similar).
However, I think the best way would be to create a custom macro which will exactly fit. There might be some combination of macros and macro functions - but I think it is faster just to code a custom one which will cover your need 100%.
Also, you can take a look on the K# if there is something that will fit - http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/6_0/devguide/ksharp_syntax.htm
I have a custom SharePoint application page deployed to the _layouts folder. It's a custom "new form" for a custom content type. During my interactions with this page, I will need to add an item to my list. When the page first loads, I can use SPContext.Current.List to see the current list I'm working with. But after I fill in my form and the form posts back onto itself and IsPostBack is true, then SPContext.Current.List is null so I can't find the list that I need to add my stuff into.
Is this expected?
How should I retain some info about my context list across the postback? Should I just populate some asp:hidden control with my list's guid and then just pull it back from that on the postback? That seems safe, I guess.
FWIW, this is the MOSS 2007 Standard version.
Generally speaking I try and copy whatever approach the product group has taken when looking to add functionality of my own. In this case they add their own edit/view/add pages via the list definition itself.
I built a solution that also needed its own custom "New" form, not open source unfortunately, though if you are interested you can download it, its called "Tagged Links" (Social Bookmarking for SharePoint) and you can find some links on my blog.
To give you a few hints and tips, the following should set you off in the right direction:
Created a new list definition.
Created a new Content Type In the content type you can define your own "FormTemplates" that references a Rendering Template which determine what gets displayed in the "Middle" bit of those forms.
Copied the standard Rendering Template, but then made the changes to it that I
needed.
Wrapped it all up in a solution, and deployed.
My Rendering Template actually included an overridden "Save" Button where I did a lot of the extra work I needed to do during the save.
Anyway, it is a little too much work in my opinion but, I think, it most closely matches the standard approach taken by the product developers. Let me know if you need more detail and I will see if I can put together a step-by-step blog post, but hopefully this gets you off on the right direction.
I would be surprised if you could do something in a _Layouts file that you can't do in a forms template. You have pretty much the same technologies at your disposal.
Looking at the way SharePoint works with ListItems and Layouts pages (for example "Manage Permissions" on a list item), I can see that they pass some variables in via querystrings:
?obj={76113B3A-FABA-4389-BC85-4BB2CC5AB423},6,LISTITEM&List={76113B3A-FABA-4389-BC85-4BB2CC5AB423}
Perhaps they grab the context back each time programmatically using these values.
I'm not using a custom "new form", so this might not apply. I added an event receiver to my custom content type and then do my custom code in the ItemAdded or ItemAdding events. This code fires when the event is added to a list. You can use the event receiver properties to get to the parent List, Web, and Site.
I'd like to think my issue is "special" here, since I am using a custom form. I chose to use a custom form rather than a custom FormTemplate simply because I'm doing a lot of stuff that's not very SharePoint list-like (making ajax calls to get info from a third-party app then generating some dynamic form elements based on that ajax result, then subsequent processing of that data on postback). I thought it'd be a nightmare to try this within the usual custom rendering template mechanism.
I also don't think I can supply the custom form declarations in the list definition itself, because I have multiple content types associated with this list, and each content type has its own custom form (the other type is thankfully much simpler).
Actually, my simple way of keeping the list guid in my hidden field was a very low impact way to address this specific problem. My main concern is that I'm not sure why the SPContext just loses all its usefulness when I postback here, which makes me think I'm doing something wrong.