CHeck out this article https://skrift.io/articles/archive/building-with-components/ that migth be what you are looking for

I don't know that you have to allow users to add classes to sections when using the Umbraco Grid.

That being said, I personally use Archetype.

I will probably move over to Nested Content at some point, but Nested Content still can't do some things that Archetype can do, so I'm holding off for a bit.

If you are starting from scratch, I'd probably recommend Nested Content, as it does most things that are needed. Last I checked, the main things that were missing were disabling items without deleting them (possible with a plugin) and moving nested items up a level or items into a nested item (in Archetype, this feature is called Cross-Archetype Dragging).

If you go with Archetype, I wrote an article a while back that may help: https://skrift.io/articles/archive/building-umbraco-websites-with-archetype-widgets-and-ditto/

The concepts are very similar for Nested Content too.

Yeah, Archetype and Nested Content would allow you to do that. I'm not sure where you go the impression that you had to hard code an "if not null". There are many ways to go about it.

For example, you can do it by convention. So if your Nested Content item has an alias of "photoGallery", you then create a file at `~/Views/Partials/Widgets/PhotoGalery.cshtml".

Or you can leave it up to each widget to indicate the path to the CSHTML file that will render it (e.g., by creating a base class or interface with a ViewPath string property).

Or you can render the data as JSON and then handle everything on the frontend (e.g., with Angular, AngularJS, Vue, React, plain JavaScript, or whatever).

There are a great many ways you can do this. These plugins just give you the ability to create complex lists/hierarchies of heterogeneous data, which you can for example use to create widgets.

Here's a screenshot of how you can create these widgets in the content section of Umbraco (from the article I mentioned above):

It has three widgets. You click the "+" button and you can add more widgets to that page.

FYI, here is some code from one of the websites I'm working on that contains Archetype widgets:

@* Render each widget. *@
@foreach (var widget in widgets)
{

    // Validate the path to the partial view for this widget.
    var view = widget.Widget.ViewPath;
    if (!System.IO.File.Exists(Server.MapPath(view)))
    {
        <!-- Skipping widget, @(widget.Widget.GetType().Name) (no matching file found to render it). -->
        continue;
    }

    // Render the widget.
    @Html.Partial(view, widget)

}

You can see that it's just a matter of looping through each widget and rendering each of them. In the base class for all widgets, I have this:

public virtual string ViewPath
{
    get
    {
        var typeName = GetType().Name;
        return $"~/Views/Partials/Widgets/{typeName}.cshtml";
    }
}

So it figures out the partial view for the widget based on a convention, but also allows each widget to change this if it has some special reason for doing so (e.g., if multiple widgets share the same view logic, they could then share the same CSHTML file).

Nested Content should be very, very similar to this.

And this is just how I do it on this site. You have a lot of control in deciding how you want to display the data.

BTW, I use Ditto to map Archetypes to C# classes. That's why I'm using the class name to figure out the CSHTML filename rather than the Archetype fieldset alias.

Hi mizzle,

Just want to throw in my 2 cents as I've tried both Archetype and Nested Content along with some other approaches; but what I've found gives the greatest flexibility in terms of editor-friendliness & ease of use from a developer's perspective (and I'm mosty a frontend guy) is this package called Embedded Content Blocks - it's really flexible and does some really clever things out-of-the-box:

• If you use it to replace a Nested Content property, it converts the content.
• It has built-in "label templates" for many standard property-types so the previews usually "just work".
• It's very easy to use specific partials for rendering the blocks.
• You can specify a secondary tab from the Document Type as a "settings" tab; convenient for not-so-often used stuff.
• Items can be turned on and off without needing to manually check anything in the code for rendering.

/Chriztian

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