Is there a canonical list (public or private-that-you're-willing-to-share) of Magento objects (and their database persistance tables) that allow you add Layout XML Updates to the system? I realize there's an almost infinite number with third party modules, but I'm specifically interested in what ships with CE, Professional, and Enterprise Edition.
In case that's not clear, consider Magento's CMS pages. In the CMS admin there's a textarea for
Layout Update XML
in the Design tab.
This XML is persisted to the database with the CMS Page object, and these updates are added to the Layout object when that page is loaded.
There's multiple places in the Magento admin where this happens. I'm looking for a list of all of them.
I had trouble filtering by a specific branch with Google's search operators, but this is a decent start: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22custom_layout_update%22+site%3Asvn.magentocommerce.com
Not many that I can see,
Mage/Catalog/Model/Category.php
Mage/GoogleBase/Model/Attribute.php
And the CMS module as mentioned above.
Related
I have a portal in Liferay 6.2, and need to design the velocity template of a web content that must have a menu listing the pages (linked names) of the site where is present.
My questions are:
Is this possible?
What would be the correct way to do this?
Would it be better to make a portlet instead of a web content for this purpose?
Thanks for the help.
It feels a bit like you are trying to solve many problems in a single template - consider to compose the UI from many different elements (e.g. custom portlets) rather than building the one structure/template that fits all requirements.
That being said, as there's also the chance that your template doesn't do more than just displaying the current navigation: You have two options: The out-of-the-box Navigation portlet is quite configurable, you might be able to utilize that one instead of implementing anything yourself (check the configuration options).
And lastly, if you want to implement for yourself: Get hold of the themeDisplay object. With getLayout() you'll get the current page, while getLayouts() you'll get all pages of the current site and can enumerate them. However, there's one problem: You typically don't have access to the themeDisplay object from a CMS template. But there are several ways to still get to the data (search the Liferay forums for cms template themedisplay). Also, an Application Display Template will be a lot more powerful - and you can also check how the layouts collection is built - just search for usage of ThemeDisplay.setLayouts in Liferay's source code. But with ADT we're diverting from your original question.
Liferay offers a sitemap portlet out-of-the-box which lists pages of a site. You can configure it and define your own application display template (ADT).
Kentico 8.2.
I've got a layout "master" file - the creatively named Master.ascx.
I've got three web part zones in the layout: header, main and footer. Main just includes a content placeholder which is overridden by the next layout down - home, standard, whatever.
I could just drag and drop web parts onto the header and footer web part zones on to the "design" tab, but I don't want to for a few reasons:
Which web parts go in which zone is stored in the database, which isn't versioned in Git. The layout file itself is versioned via the "store CMS Virtual Files on disk" option.
The layout markup inside the header is complicated enough that I'll end up needing to have 4 or 5 web part zones for 4 or 5 web parts - or I'll need to write a layout web part or drag row layouts / column layouts in, etc - it seems much simpler to just hardcode web parts inside bespoke markup.
I find editing a plain text file with Visual Studio much faster than dragging and dropping web parts into a zone, and the same applies for anyone else who'll ever work on this site.
Which web parts go in which web part zone doesn't ever change - there's always a primary nav, share-on-facebook, etc - which web parts are included will never need to be in any way dynamic.
Is it possible to just hardcode a web part into my layout?
To answer your question, no you cannot hard code webparts in your layout. Simple reasoning is webparts are not part of a layout, they are part of a template . The webpart definition for each template is stored with the template in the database as XML. You can see this by going to a template and selecting the Webparts tab and it will display all the XML for each of the webparts on that page template.
Understand where you're coming from with your 4 points. What you also need to consider is:
what happens when you want/need upgrade or apply a hotfix?
from the client, content editor and content administrators perspective, having everything in code, renders the CMS pretty useless.
if you code everything in a physical file, it's then pretty pointless to have a CMS if it requires a developer or a physical code change for every request
The point of the CMS is to be dynamic and database driven. Not everything can reside in the file system, database or a code repository. Kentico has some very strong developer tools you can enable like workflow, versioning, and check-in/out.
I'd also enable your DBA and ensure they have a valid backup and recovery plan in the event of some disaster.
It's not possible, because it goes against the Portal Engine development model. If your main issue is the unavailability of these objects in GIT consider the option to save virtual objects (https://docs.kentico.com/display/K82/Deployment+mode+for+virtual+objects) to the file system, so they are picked up by GIT. I'd also suggest to keep the website upgrade safe (e.g. by using the Portal model), because the next version will feature CI support (saving of all DB objects to the file system) http://www.kentico.com/product/roadmap which is due to be released in 2 months
I am aware of a program called "SharePoint Designer 20xx), and I would like to know if any of you have modified the default master page to make it.. less confusing and more simplistic. Can this be however I want it or is there limitations?
I also found this:
http://www.expertsharepointconsulting.com/images/Blue%20Large.PNG
I would like to implement a design similar to this! If I were to download a "Free sharepoint master page", would this design only work for the main page of SharePoint? as in if I were to go from the newly added masterpage, to a page called "reports", would it be completely different? If so how can I get around this?
You can create customized masterpages whichever way you want. Usually you don't touch the default ones, specially because you can break some system pages with that. Just create new ones from them or from the minimum.master one.
As an example of a Sharepoint Website using a very customized master page I can point you to a publishing website project I was involved for a Portuguese company: http://www.ana.pt/en-US/Pages/Homepage.aspx
It's all Sharepoint 2010...and it is fully customized
You can of course use the same template for all pages, just have to set it on the root site and say that all sub sites inherit from it.
To achieve the level of design changes you see on that web site you have to build new master pages, page layouts, use JS, CSS and user controls (the website uses little to no web parts).
we don't use Sharepoint designer because that would mean the files becoming unghosted, which can be pain sometimes, and sharepoint designer is not a very good tool.
The way we do it is by implementing everything on visual studio and deploying it via WSP packages. This way everything stays ghosted on the file system. You can check an example here:
http://mihirsharepoint.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/creating-custom-master-page-in-visual-studio-and-deploy-it-to-the-sharepoint-site/
My customer wants to provide 2 themes for a SharePoint application. Is there a strategy to accomplish this in MOSS 2007?
We want to apply user profile-based theme selection, and maybe even a drop-down to switch modes.
I don't know how extensive you want your re-theming to be. However if it could be CSS-only you could use this approach:
Store the CSS files for the different themes in the Style Library.
Create a list that stores the user and their chosen theme.
Write a feature and custom application page to allow the user to change their theme.
Write a control that does a lookup on the list against the current user and obtains the a reference to the corresponding CSS file in the Style Library. The control would then output the CssRegistration and CssLink controls to the page for this file.
Add this control to the master page so it executes on every page (caching should be added).
I can't see why this wouldn't be supportable by Microsoft as you're only changing CSS.
If you need to do more than that then another option is to write an HTTP module that changes the HTML output. Or of course JavaScript. With these two options you may have supportability issues (it depends on how extensive your changes are).
There is also SPThemes now available on Codeplex from Bjørn Furuknap. Users can choose their own themes and they can be applied at different scopes.
Here are the options that I’ve come up with from research and feedback. Both of which seem mostly infeasible.
Implement major UI layout changes in JavaScript. This would lead to client slowdowns, would be difficult to code, and would be completely unsupported by Microsoft due to the need to reference SharePoint objects that may change with subsequent SharePoint patches.
Provide two parallel themed sites based on the same data, and provide a way to switch between them. This would require that we deploy each site to multiple locations, and would require retooling of any site creation mechanisms in code (since they'd need to target two sites instead of one).
One another thing you can try is to use the Theme Changer and ThemeChangerStaple from codeplex , That is implemented as feature you can use the same code logic to archive what you want with bit of modification, give it as an option for the user using CustomAction.
I am new to SharePoint development. We have created a base site template and have used that template to start new sites in other locations on the same server. This works fine but the newly created site seems to "flatten" the custom content types created in the original site. I would think there would be a way to keep the original content type inheritance intact to help support any necessary modifications on the new site. They can still make the modifications but they take longer because you have to visit each list individually. Does anyone know how to fix this or know a better way to approach this?
The problem you are having is the move from your original site collection to another. The site template does not store the complete definition of a site - only the differences from the underlying site definition. Move from one site collection to another and you lose the underlying site definition and run into problems such as the loss of your content types.
Site templates and site definitions are two separate customizations you can undertake. You need to make a decision based on your requirements as to which is best.
Site templates
Pro's:
Easy to create and reuse through the SharePoint interface
Ideal for end users
A site template is a customization of the underlying default site definition
Con's:
Dependency on underlying site definition means SharePoint updates could break your site templates
Poor performance since the modifications are held in the database and are read from the DB and compiled on each request
Limited customization options
Site definitions
Pro's:
Harder to create: involves coding XML
Made by developers and site administrators
Independent of SharePoint default site definitions so not affected by SharePoint updates
Limitless customization options
Con's:
Difficult to modify when deployed
Can be cached on the file system so is fast to load
Check out Google for info on creating custom site definitions.
Hope this helps!
Jonny
The best way to do this is to create a site definition where the content types are within features whose scope is to the farm.
Tim