Hi,

I am new to this and need help urgently.  I am creating a blog and I need to display the 5 latest posts on the home page.  I want to select the posts in a surface controller and pass them as model to a razor partial view where I output the blog description, title, thumbnail sized image and link to the blog post.

I have been able to do this successfully to output what I need:

@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage

@{

    var firstTypedContentAtRoot = Umbraco.TypedContentAtRoot().FirstOrDefault();

    IEnumerable<IPublishedContent> posts = firstTypedContentAtRoot.Descendants(3);

}

<h4>Our Latest Blog Posts</h4>

@foreach (IPublishedContent post in posts)

{

    <div style="display: inline-block; width: 20%; padding: 2%; vertical-align: top;margin-top:0px;">

        <div>

            <a href="@post.Url">@post.Name</a>

        </div>

        @if (post.HasValue("imagePicker"))

        {

            var dynamicMediaItem = Umbraco.Media(post.GetPropertyValue("imagePicker"));

            <img src="@dynamicMediaItem.umbracoFile" alt="@dynamicMediaItem.Name" style="float: left;border: 0;width: 45%;margin-right:5px;margin-bottom:5px;" />

        } 

        @if (post.HasValue("shortDescription"))

        {

            string blurb = post.GetPropertyValue("shortDescription").ToString();

            <p>@blurb</p>

        }

        <div style="clear:both"></div>

    </div>

}

But when I try to get posts from surface controller using content service, I can only get a list of type Content/IContent, which I am then struggling to output on the partial view.  In particular the image because I only seem to be able to output an image when I use:

@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage

And if I use this then I can't also pass in a model from the surface controller(?)

My code in the surface controller looks like this and returns a partial view:

  IContentTypeService contentTypeService = ApplicationContext.Current.Services.ContentTypeService;

            IContentType mytype = contentTypeService.GetContentType("BlogPage");

            // get all content by type

            IContentService contentService = ApplicationContext.Current.Services.ContentService;

            IEnumerable<IContent> items = contentService.GetContentOfContentType(mytype.Id);

I am seriously confused and possibly looking in the wrong direction.  Please can anyone help me or point me in the right direction. Many thanks.

Karen