Have you looked at dynamic content plugins? Ted has a nice post on it here: http://tedgustaf.com/en/blog/2011/4/creating-dynamic-content-in-episerver-cms-6-r2/

Thank's for the reply.  I will look further into that option but I am not sure it addresses our rquirement.  Le me explain in just a little more detail.

We have a carousel control that will contain anywhere from 3 - 5 items.  The content of the items will come from the CMS.  Each item will need an HTML snippet, some header text and a URL.  Previously our designer had just added 5 sets of properties to any page containing this carousel.  In my opinion this is too limiting and I would like the carousel to dynamically populate itself based on what is in the CMS.

My initial idea was to create a page type for these items and then add them as children of the page containing the carousel.  We would end up with something like:

Home Page
    Carousel Item 1
    Carousel Item 2
    Carousel Item 3
    etc.

The carousel control would then look for pages of type Carousel Item to fill in the carousel.  The only issue is that the Carousel Item pages are never meant to be viewed by themselves.  They are only there to fill in the carousel control on the Home page.

Does a dynamic content plugin solve this requirement?  If not, is my solution ok or is there a better way?

Thanks again!

Sure you can use Page Types for this, if you're using CMS 6 R2 you can use the container page type (doesn't have view mode) or you can set the shortcut to No link, only text (basically does the same as container page types). Other options to consider is using something like MultipleProperty, in the usage instruction document they have an example of creating an image gallery that can easily be adapted to a carousel.

Hope this helps.

Frederik