Language Fallback in Sitecore 6.x

Background

Built-in language versioning in Sitecore leaves a little bit to be desired.  There are 2 major issues we see in the stock implementation of language versioning in Sitecore:

• If you attempt to retrieve an item from Sitecore that doesn't exist in the current context language, Sitecore returns an empty, useless item.
• When a version is added for a given Sitecore item, it inherits NONE of the values from any existing version.  This means any image, treelist value, droplist value, etc. are all empty/blanked out in the new language item, and you are starting with a blank slate.

Depending on how the site is structured, the first item can be less of an issue.  If we're supporting another language on a page or a whole site, it's obvious we'll need to translate any needed content into the new language.  It can be painful to add new item versions in Spanish (for instance) for every single item a page may make use of.

What's even MORE troubling is the second issue: any new language version of an item starts from scratch.  Any treelist, droplist, or droplink fields, image/media selections, etc. are all empty!  This poses a big problem, as content editors then have to click back and forth between the original language and the new language versions and essentially "recreate" the state of the item and its data.

Solution

Shared Source to the Rescue

Luckily, we're not the first people to come across these challenges.  After a bit of Googling of the issue, we came across this great blog post and video from Alex Shyba of Sitecore USA:

http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2010/11/approaching-language-fallback-with.html

the module itself can now be found at:

http://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Language_Fallback.aspx

We believe the partial/field-level language fallback solution he created as a Sitecore shared source module is a very elegant and powerful solution to the second problem discussed above.

What is Language Fallback

Briefly, language fallback is the concept of allowing a language version of a Sitecore item to "inherit" its content from a version in another language.  For us in the USA, this normally means when we create a new version in Spanish, Chinese, etc., we want it to initially take all of its content from the existing version in English, rather than starting blank.  This accomplishes two goals:

• Gives a good starting point for translation.  Having valid content in all fields on an item allow a content editor to visually see what still needs to be translated to a new language as they review pages.
• Maintains any existing item selections for images, treelists, droplists, etc., etc.  This is a HUGE benefit and time saver for the content editor.

Brief Overview

The module can be installed as a Sitecore package, and adds a field to a Sitecore template that allows it to take part in language fallback:

 

 

Once a template is configured for fallback, you can navigate to an item based on that template and add a new version of the item in the new language.  Any fields configured for fallback will now inherit their values from the fallback language.  Any fields that have a fallback value will be marked as so (circled in the image):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pitfalls

A few things to bear in mind when implementing this solution:

• A version still needs to exist for any item the page needs in the new language (see the "Background" section above).
• The shared source module is currently built against Sitecore 6.5, so you may need to rebuild it for the Sitecore environment in use.
  • In our case, we build the module against Sitecore 6.3 dlls, and had to resolve a couple of areas that weren't compatible (properties didn't exist, etc.)
• You must configure the site to enable language fallback
  • Normally you can use the included Sitecore.SharedSource.PartialLanguageFallback.config file that is included as part of the module in /App_Config/include.
  • We already had an include file that contains our site definitions, so the enableFallback key needed to be added to the end of that site definition to get it to work.  There seemed to be a "collision" of sorts when the site definition was patched in two separate places, and Sitecore thought the site was being defined twice.
• The "fallback value" labels will not show up if View->Standard Fields is enabled (on the ribbon/toolbar).  A separate content editor renderer is used when the content editor is in that "mode."

 

 

Validating multiple forms the ASP.NET MVC3 way, using strongly typed Views

Background

With the advent of ASP.NET MVC, we've been able to support more than one <form> tag on a page (finally).  MVC also has excellent support for out of the box validation using strongly-typed Views and its data annotations attributes on the model classes.

Combining these two features in a meaningful way is surprisingly tough to figure out the first time around, and Google is relatively devoid of people talking about it.  Let's look at how to accomplish this.

Solution

One of the keys to getting side-by-side validation going is creating a proper View hierarchy.  We need to construct our views so that we have the following nesting:

The model(s) for these views should be similarly nested:

Each of the above views should be strongly typed to the corresponding model above.  This allows us to render the partial "form views" within the main view, and pass the correct model to each, like so:

@Html.Partial("Form1", Model.Form1Model)

Rendering a strongly typed partial view in this way will allow the built in validation to take place on that model correctly, and independently of the other form view or the main view.  That is the key to the whole process.

A practical example

That all sounds great in theory, but here's how to actually wire up a working multi-form example in the real world.  We'll create a view that allows a user to perform a search using two separate sets of criteria, and two forms.  Here are the important bits:

The model

        public class SearchViewModel
    	{
		public NameSearchViewModel NameSearch { get; set; }

		public SeatSearchViewModel SeatSearch { get; set; }
	}

	public class NameSearchViewModel
	{
		[Required]
		public string Name { get; set; }
	}

	public class SeatSearchViewModel
	{
		[Required]
		public string Row { get; set; }

		[Required]
		public string Seat { get; set; }
	}

Controller

The controller action can simply return the main view, bound to the top-level model:

SearchViewModel model = new SearchViewModel
{
	NameSearch = new NameSearchViewModel(),
	SeatSearch = new SeatSearchViewModel()
};

return View(model);

The view

Name search partial view

@model Model.NameSearchViewModel

@using (Ajax.BeginForm(new AjaxOptions() { Url = "/namesearch/"))
{
	<label for="name">Name</label>
	@Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.Name, new { id = "name" })
	@Html.ValidationMessageFor(m => m.Name, "Please enter a name")
	<input id="nameSearch" type="image" src="/assets/images/btn-search.png" alt="search" />
}

The other form partial is very similar, so is being left out intentionally.

Main View, render the partials

@model Model.SearchViewModel

<h3>Search By</h3>
@Html.Partial("NameSearch", Model.NameSearch)
<p>OR</p>
@Html.Partial("SeatSearch", Model.SeatSearch)
		

That's it!  MVC takes care of the difficult stuff and we're able to write cleaner, more efficient code.

Our favorite two Umbraco packages

With the multitude of Umbraco packages available, it’s hard to sort through the noise and find the most useful ones.With that in mind, we wanted to share our two favorite ones.

UComponents

http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ucomponents

UComponents has a vast array of data types and other useful tools. We find that Umbraco’s built in data types do not always fit our needs. That's where UComponents fills the gap. If we can’t find what we need with the built in data types, we can usually find a UComponent data type that does.

 Umbraco XPath Evaluator

http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/umbraco-xpath-evaluator

Umbraco’s built in development tools leave much to be desired. Our favorite tool is the XPath Evaluator. It allows you to test your XPath queries against the live Umbraco XML. It's indispensible when creating new XPath queries to search Umbraco. XPath Evaluator is simple but powerful.

Loading site-specific CSS files into Sitecore's rich text editor

Background

We work with a lot of multi-site Sitecore installations, and generally feel this is an area Sitecore excels at... however...

The Sitecore content editor interface does have some areas that don't lend it to good multi-site use though, one of which is the rich text editor.  Ideally the CSS dropdown in the editor would display CSS classes from a site-specific CSS file.  Unfortunately, out of the box Sitecore does not have the facility to do this.

Without the ability to have site-specific CSS classes, the admins for each site in a multi site installation would be forced to share a CSS file and see styles for all of the other sites - not the greatest user experience.

The Solution(s) - old and new

We've solved this for a while by using code similar to what's found on the Sitecore Developer Network.  This worked great for a time, but as of Sitecore 6.4 it stopped working.

So what happened?  The default.aspx and the code-behind class that are key to the above solution are still present in Sitecore 6.4, but they are not used.

Thankfully, we found a great blog post on the subject by Mark Stiles that pointed us toward the correct solution for Sitecore 6.4+.  The revamped rich text editor uses a handful of new classes, and, as always, knowing where to look makes all the difference.  A big thanks to Mark, as no one else on the Sitecore Developer Network or elsewhere seems to be talking about this.  (Just a note: I would recommend inheriting from Sitecore.Shell.Controls.RichTextEditor.EditorPage and overriding OnLoad, rather than copying it from Reflector or similar as it appears Mark did).

Inheriting from Sitecore.Shell.Controls.RichTextEditor.EditorPage allowed us to support site-specific CSS files in the RTE and keep the level of user-friendliness our clients have come to expect.

 

Bluetube is a cutting edge digital agency that designs and builds native mobile, mobile web, tablet, social, and presence solutions.  You can find out more about Bluetube at www.bluetubeinteractive.com.

NInject and Umbraco Trouble? Or simply need to extend Global.asax?

So Bluetube Interactive has recently been doing a lot of Umbraco projects, rolling out several new sites on the platform.  As a method of speeding development, all of our projects leverage Injection frameworks and our framework of choice for .NET is NInject.  However, due Umbraco and NInject both want to extend the Global.asax, which isn't possible.  So what is a developer to do?

The answer is surprisingly simple.  Although Umbraco does in fact extend Global.asax in its own class, it turns out it does not have a significant use... or at least one not significant enough to prevent us from wanting to use our Injection framework of choice.

In the bin folder, find a remove the following file:

App_global.asax.dll

Having issue with App_Browsers too?  It seems Umbraco inherits from that as well.

App_Browsers.dll

Both can be safely removed and at least to this point, we have not seen a negative impact.

Also, remmber with NInject you'll want to inherit from Ninject.Web.UserControlBase, not from WebControlBase.

Bluetube Interactive is a cutting edge digital agency that designs and builds native mobile, mobile web, tablet, social, and presence solutions.  You can find out more about Bluetube Interactive at www.bluetubeinteractive.com

Adding facebook comments to a .Net page

Facebook makes it very easy to add comments to a website but with their old api  and new api  and updates its often difficult to follow what you should and shouldn't be doing.  In the end the code was very simple but it took us a few rounds to get it correct.  Bluetube interactive implemented facebook comments for one of our clients Ticket Alternative as follows :

Setup your commenting "app"

First you need to create an app for your comments and if you have multiple websites I'd suggest creating an app with a unique name..  You do this under "my apps" in your facebook account, you can read more about it here.

You should now have an app id, and you'll want to cut/paste this somewhere for easy retrieval, it will look something like :

204151772941335

(example app id, don't use it)

Getting the code

You can then get facebook to generate the comment code for you

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

You then need to paste that code into your page, correcting the appid if its wrong ( I have multuple app id's so it chose the wrong one)

The code will look something like this :