This is my first post! Was recenty introduced to Umbraco and completed the Level 1 development course last week, I'm really impressed with the software and looking forward to getting involved in the community and developing for Umbraco.
While I'm finding my feet, one of the things that has struck me is the organisation of document types... we are going to be running 7.2.1 to power both a very large, complex website as well as 20 or so other, smaller scale websites.
I'm seeing the potential of having lots of document types, however, with 20 or so sites each having between 5 and 30 document types, the idea that these are presented in one big long list in settings is a bit daunting...
Has anybody with experience of managing large sites found a useful way to organise document types to make this easier to maintain?
An ideal solution I guess would to be able to have the list filter you can have on content types, but I can't see anything that would suggest this is available.
Any suggestions or advice would be greatfully recieved :-)
The easiest way of sorting these would be to create a master page (without any properties etc.) and name it after your homepage/the name of the project. It's not the perfect solution but it will work I think.
You'll forgive me, I'm still a little loose with the terminology :-p, I thought Master pages were related to templates rather than document types, do you mean to create a new document type that is blank, and then set all the others that are related to use that as their master document type?
I can't see a way to change the master document type when editing a document type, so would I have to recreate those already created from scratch?
If you envisaged having a long "list" of document types for your project(s), you've probably gone about Umbraco wrong before you've really started. Lets say for example you want to build a complex structure like a house...but you have no plans. You're not going to get very far with the builder and he will tel you to go get some first!
Document types are direct correllations to the business areas that will be presented within your website so it would make a lot of sense to ensure you literally draw them out on paper first before you map them to a set of document types. It's a document that could end up having more uses than just the website!
To get you started though, document types are heirarchical and you can initally start with a "root" or "site" type. This need not have much in the way of properties, but two of the most common root properties worth adding is meta description and page title. Basically anything that will be common across your entire application. From here you can start to build up your set.
Our main corporate site has a site root and some doctype sets outside of site which are defined as follows: Repository (RSS news feeds), Modules (re-usable html fragments for right hand boxes) & content elements (child fragments of complete pages). Underneath the root doctype are the rest of our main page types, again you can create as much or as little document heirarchy as you need for the project(s).
Get this bit right from the start and the changes you make once the site is deployed will be neglible for the life of the project, unless a new owner comes along and wants to build an extension! lol.
Organising Document Types
Howdy!
This is my first post! Was recenty introduced to Umbraco and completed the Level 1 development course last week, I'm really impressed with the software and looking forward to getting involved in the community and developing for Umbraco.
While I'm finding my feet, one of the things that has struck me is the organisation of document types... we are going to be running 7.2.1 to power both a very large, complex website as well as 20 or so other, smaller scale websites.
I'm seeing the potential of having lots of document types, however, with 20 or so sites each having between 5 and 30 document types, the idea that these are presented in one big long list in settings is a bit daunting...
Has anybody with experience of managing large sites found a useful way to organise document types to make this easier to maintain?
An ideal solution I guess would to be able to have the list filter you can have on content types, but I can't see anything that would suggest this is available.
Any suggestions or advice would be greatfully recieved :-)
Thanks!
The easiest way of sorting these would be to create a master page (without any properties etc.) and name it after your homepage/the name of the project. It's not the perfect solution but it will work I think.
Chris
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your reply!
You'll forgive me, I'm still a little loose with the terminology :-p, I thought Master pages were related to templates rather than document types, do you mean to create a new document type that is blank, and then set all the others that are related to use that as their master document type?
I can't see a way to change the master document type when editing a document type, so would I have to recreate those already created from scratch?
Appreciate the help :-)
You can create a document type and set it as "Master". Then relate it to the "real" document types you use for your project.
You can recreate every document type you already have or just copy them (while copying the document types you can set a master).
Ok yeah that makes sense! Thanks very much for the help :-)
Hi Carl
If you envisaged having a long "list" of document types for your project(s), you've probably gone about Umbraco wrong before you've really started. Lets say for example you want to build a complex structure like a house...but you have no plans. You're not going to get very far with the builder and he will tel you to go get some first!
Document types are direct correllations to the business areas that will be presented within your website so it would make a lot of sense to ensure you literally draw them out on paper first before you map them to a set of document types. It's a document that could end up having more uses than just the website!
To get you started though, document types are heirarchical and you can initally start with a "root" or "site" type. This need not have much in the way of properties, but two of the most common root properties worth adding is meta description and page title. Basically anything that will be common across your entire application. From here you can start to build up your set.
Our main corporate site has a site root and some doctype sets outside of site which are defined as follows: Repository (RSS news feeds), Modules (re-usable html fragments for right hand boxes) & content elements (child fragments of complete pages). Underneath the root doctype are the rest of our main page types, again you can create as much or as little document heirarchy as you need for the project(s).
Get this bit right from the start and the changes you make once the site is deployed will be neglible for the life of the project, unless a new owner comes along and wants to build an extension! lol.
I hope this helps
Regards
Martin
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