Content Library

Gwen Curtin

Vote:

Hi,

Our content eritors have a requirement to share content throughout the episerver site. I know I can do this by adding content to a editable area on a page and then pulling it into other pages. Is there a way to create a content library so they could pull information from a content library as well as update it? I had thought of just creating a page with different editable areas for each content section but this wouldn't allow them to add new content sections dynamically.

Thanks

Gwen

#40813

Jun 17, 2010 16:45

Vote:

Gwen:

We're just finishing a project that's very much like this. We did it by creating a "page" outside the Start Page, which has all sorts of sub pages underneath it. Those subpages are used as "fetching targets" from other pages.

Let me know if I'm understanding you right.

Deane

#40817

Jun 17, 2010 19:33

Magnus Rahl

Vote:

Gwen:

This could be a scenario where it's possible to use the "Property from other page" Dynamic Content plugin which is included in CMS 5 R2 and above. That is, if you want editors to be able to include this content when and if they want. Perhaps that's what Deane is using.

The other "classic" way of using these types of "settings pages" is to store site-wide information like contact information that goes in the footer or data that is more of settings type which you use from codebehind rather than display to the user. This practice is prefered over using dynamic properties because overusing dynamic properties is bad for performance (there are other reasons too, security/administrative and others). The two concepts can be combined, so that a dynamic property is used to point to different settings pages for different parts of the site.

#40823

Jun 18, 2010 7:34

Per Nergård

Vote:

Maybe use the DDS with a simple admin page?

#40826

Jun 18, 2010 8:37

Vote:

Actually, in this project, the pages are so deriviative between sites (there are 86 sites), that we have full pages and we use the "Fetch Data" functionality to grab the entire pagee. For something more modular, the "Page Property" dynamic content would be the way to go.

For global things like header and footer information, we do usually do those as properties on the Start Page. We wrote a little class called "GlobalContent" that we grab a property from the StartPage, so you can use it bind things in the master page:

CustomerServicePhoneNnumber.Text = GlobalContent.Get("CsPhoneNo");

OverheadLinks.DataSource = GlobalContent.Get("OverheadLinkCollection");
OverheadLinks.DataBind();

#40834

Jun 18, 2010 14:49

Frederik Vig

Vote:

Hi Gwen

I would consider using EPiServer Composer or Flexigrid for this.

Good luck!

Frederik

#40847

Jun 18, 2010 23:18

Gwen Curtin

Vote:

thanks for all the advice. Very much appreciated. What I have tried is creating a "dynamic library" set of pages and sub pages outside of teh website i think like Deane has done. I am planning on using the search function to create a start page that will make it a bit more user friendly.

Thanks

Gwen

#41039

Jun 30, 2010 9:33