I'd seriously consider using AutoFolders or DateFolders project as this will greatly simplify your solution.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

/Dirk

Perhaps this will help:

http://our.umbraco.org/forum/developers/xslt/8098-Get-property-of-sibling-within-loop - it's the XSLT approach I used to tackle the problem.

Just like Dirk says, I'd use the AutoFolders package. This package almost does the trick for you. And you will not only be able to get your news sorted into months, but also into years. It's a great package, and especially for this type of issues.

/Kim A

Thanks for the responses guys, I will have a look at Autofolders which looks like the one that should meet my needs. I will post back if I have any problems.

I've realised something that could be an issue with this. I assume these packages sort the data into folder by created date? This will be a problem because for one I am creating a Umbraco version of a site that already exists so I will have to recreate old news articles and they will all have a recent date even though they could be months old. The other issue along the same lines is that the end user will want to create news items for February in March (they might be a bit slow uploading items). Is there a way the folders can be sorted by a property of the news article that is date picker?

Hi, I think I would investigate the possibilities of using xslt keys and ids for this - using the Munchean method.

As I understand it you want to show months that actually contains data.

Check out this article for info and example: http://blackpoint.dk/umbraco-workbench.aspx?Snippet=/umbraco-workbench/xslt/grouping--distinct-values.aspx

>Tommy

You have to run the news not on createDate but define a date on the documenttype which the news shall be from.

Then use autofolders for sorting them and http://our.umbraco.org/projects/cmsimport for importing the old news (or are they already in Umbraco?) 

Rest is XSLT

I would do it that way :-)

I second to what Daniel is suggesting. In your case you can't rely on @createDate. The best way to go is to define a datefield, in which you can control how your news items are sorted etc.

In the matter of publishing news on a certain date you can use the "Publication Status" on the "property" tab. Here you can set a date, at which the news item should be published and when it should be unpublished. But please be aware that this might be buggy in 4.0.3 in some cases. Can't remember if it has already been solved in this version though.

Another option is to make a check to see if the date you have selected with your custom date property is met in your for-each loop. In that way only news from todays date or greater can be showed allowing you to add news that should not right away.

/Jan

Hi,

Thanks for the responses, Daniel that is exactly what I want to do, I want the document type to have a date picker field called something like "Week Ending" then I want the Autofolders to sort the news articles based on this field. The question is how do I do this? Am I going to have to modify the source code (hopefully not because my asp.net is quite limited)?

Hi again,

It's not so complicated, add a "weekEnding" property to your document type with a date picker.

In your autofolder settings you then define that you are going to sort the news with that property "weekEnding" 

<property alias="DateField">weekEnding</property>

Is that enough to get you going? :-)

I was hoping it was that easy! Ok we'll I haven't actually mananged to get Autofolders working yet, I have installed the package but so far it is not sorting my folders. I will have a little play and post back if I get stuck. Thank you for all your help.

Ok I have been trying for a while and I cannot get this to work, I am getting all sorts of funny errors such as when I try and publish the news article I get Object reference not set to an instance of an object

I have installed the package, I have got a document type that has an alias of "Newsarticle" and it has a date picker field that has an alias of "weekEnding". These pages are created under a document type called News Section. I have copied over the contents of the bin folder from the Umbraco 4.0.3 install that contains the hotfix relating to the date picker property. I have the following in my autofolders config file. Can anyone see what I am doing wrong? Do I have to create a document type called "DateFolder"? I was under the impression that this was a default folder in Umbraco?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<settings>
  <folderProviders>
  <folderProvider alias="DateFolderProviderNews"
            assembly="/bin/AutoFolders"
            type="AutoFolders.Providers.DateFolderProvider">
       <property alias="MonthFormat">MMMM</property>
       <property alias="YearFormat">yyyy</property>
          <property alias="DateField">weekEnding</property>
     </folderProvider>
  </folderProviders>
 <autoFolders>
  <autoFolder docType="Newsarticle"
             folderProviderAlias="DateFolderProviderNews"
             folderDocType="DateFolder" 
             />
 </autoFolders>

</settings>

Has anyone got any ideas on this issue? I get the following error when I try and save and publish a News article and I have selected a date from the "Week ending" date picker. If I do not select a date then I can save and publish without any problems. This is the error I receive:

Server Error in '/' Application.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Object reference not set to an instance of an object. 

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. 

Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Source Error: 

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.  

Stack Trace: 

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]

   umbraco.cms.businesslogic.Content.CreateContent(ContentType ct) +118

   umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document.MakeNew(String Name, DocumentType dct, User u, Int32 ParentId) +387

   AutoFolders.Providers.DateFolderProvider.CreateFolderStructure(Document newDocument, Int32 iNodeRootFolder, String folderDocTypeAlias) +392

   AutoFolders.ApplicationBase.Document_New(Document sender, Object e) +174

   umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document.FireAfterPublish(PublishEventArgs e) +27

   umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document.PublishWithResult(User u) +1109

   umbraco.cms.presentation.editContent.Publish(Object sender, EventArgs e) +177

   System.EventHandler.Invoke(Object sender, EventArgs e) +0

   umbraco.controls.ContentControl.savePublish(Object Sender, ImageClickEventArgs e) +46

   System.Web.UI.WebControls.ImageButton.OnClick(ImageClickEventArgs e) +108

   System.Web.UI.WebControls.ImageButton.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +118

   System.Web.UI.WebControls.ImageButton.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +10

   System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +13

   System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +36

   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1565

My head is to tired today to go through code and errors :(.

What about installing http://our.umbraco.org/projects/business-website-starter-pack , Dan Drayne has made his news section just as you want, but without autofolders - but you could add autofolders to it or just check out how it is done? :)

Sorry you're having so many issues trfletch.  I faced a similar scenario a couple of weeks ago where I needed clients to be able to add news articles into the CMS and have them display on the website under year/month headings, so you'd get:

2010

January

Article header 1

Article header 2

February

Article header 3

Article header 4

March

Etc etc etc

I wasn't aware of the datefolder or sortfolder packages at the time, but I created my own system very easily by just having the client create year folders and month folders in the CMS, and then add articles to them.  I didn't go down to day level as it was overkill for the number of articles they have and the admin overhead in creating so many folders manually.  That made it very simple for them to manage, they could go backwards and add old articles, and it also made it very simple to display the articles on the site - under only the months/years available.  It was a simple bit of XSLT to group the results by month (which I posted in my link earlier).

I could give you more detail if you're interested, or perhaps I've got the wrong end of the stick and you're looking to do something very different?  Let me know if I can be of use anyhow...

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the response, the method you described is my last resort if I do not get Autofolders to working but I really want this to be automatic so the Umbraco user doesn't have to manually create the Month folders, partly because it is a extra step for them and partly because they could make a mistake when typing the name of the folder.

Also I have other sites that could benefit for using Autofolders because users have complained that they would like the nodes to be sorted either into alphabetical or date folders to make it easy to manage when there are a lot of nodes under one folder therefore I am really eager to get this working.

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