Hi everyone,

I recently posted this question "https://our.umbraco.org/forum/using-umbraco-and-getting-started/91533-create-a-shallow-copy-of-a-page" and so far, it seems like there is no "out of the box" support for this. However, I think this would be a very useful feature that could be used by way more people than just me. Even though I already explained the idea in the linked post, I'll do it again here in more details.

Having a tree structure is a very powerful feature of Umbraco that let implementers to display structured data thanks to a simple query. However, in a web site, it can happen that some pages are referenced in more than one single location.

Let's imagine this simple case. We have an home page, some categories and some products. The content structure would be something like this:

Home page
   Category 1
      Product 1
      Product 2
   Category 2
      Product 3
   Category 3
      Product 4
      Product 5
      Product 6

The homepage layout just makes a query to retrieve all the categories and display a box for each of them. For each of these boxes, another query is made to retrieve all products of this category and display them as a simple link.

Currently, this is really easy to do with Umbraco. However, let's imagine that we want to add another category. Maybe something like "Our top product" that should be displayed as the last box. This category wouldn't contain any new product, only product that already exists, so something like this:

...
   Our top products
      Product 1
      Product 3
      Product 6 

The problem here is that currently, there is (as far as I know but I might be wrong) no way to do this AND keep the nice structure tree. There are some workarounds as explained in the linked post but not a real solution (once again, I might be wrong).

So I wondered if it wouldn't be useful to be able to create "document references". Basically, when the user right clicks on a page in the content section, a "Create reference" option would be present. After clicking on it, a dialog such as the one for moving an item appears and ask the user where to put the reference. In our example, we would click on "Product 1", then create a reference that we would put in "Our top products" category.

Then a reference would be created. I say reference as it is not a new page or something, this is just a structural item that would appear under "Our top products". Besides, when the user clicks on "Product 1" to edit its content, Umbraco should react as if he clicked on "Product 1" under the "Category 1" category. Finally, deleting the main page would either delete all references or maybe show a dialog warning the user about it and ask him to confirm that it is what he really wants.

The advantages would be that :

• As this item is included in the tree structure under "Our top products", the query on the homepage that retrieve products of a category would then retrieve as well the products of the "Our top products" category.
• The job of content editors will be greatly reduced. Indeed, they just have to create pages and references to have a working home page.
• Deleting a page would remove all references to that page directly, content manager wouldn't have to search for all locations where this product was used.

Bottom line, this feature would allow the user to structure their site as they are used to while being able to reference a page from a different location than where it really exists.