I have only been using Umbraco for about a week now, but am loving it so far, and trying to learn everything I can so I can start pushing it into production. One thing I am struggling with is having multiple content references for a single document type. I know there are a few extensions that can do this (http://www.farmcode.org/post/2010/06/29/Multi-node-tree-picker-source-code-from-CodeGarden-2010.aspx) but I want to make sure I am not missing anything in the built-in functionality that would allow me to do this kind of thing. If it's not already built-in, does anyone know if this is something planned for the 5.0 release coming in 2011?
Glad you're enjoying your introduction to Umbraco.
The link you are referencing is a little out of date, the Multi Tree Node Picker is part of uComponents (version 2.0 released today) http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ucomponents the Multi Node Tree Picker is a great Data Type and I use it on most of my projects.
I'm not 100% from your post on what you're trying to achieve, maybe you could post the problem you're trying to solve and see what solutions are available, there's often a few ways to achieve the same task? There is a content picker that comes with the standard install but that only allows you to select one node.
Umbraco does not include 'everything' out the box (by design), so for most if not all projects you will have to install 3rd party packages or datatypes. These packages are all available from the Projects tab here and are built by members of the community.
Saying that, parts of uComponents are to be included in Umbraco v5 though it's not been specified which ones.
I certainly wouldn't hold back and wait until 5.0 as this is a fair way off and the current version of Umbraco is powerful as is.
That turned out to be a little bit of a ramble, hope the info helped!
Thanks for the response Rich! I actually started playing with uComponents but I will have to check out the new version. Character Limit (which is listed on the codeplex site) is a feature I was really looking forward to and was wondering when the new version would be released!
As far as what I am trying to accomplish, I would like to have a featured teaser on a homepage that does something similar to what you see at the top of IGN http://ps3.ign.com/ or the "Today's top stories" block on the UGO site http://www.ugo.com/ ; The difference is that while these have a static number of items (5 on ign and 4 on ugo) I would want to be able to include an unlimited number of content references, the front end would be handled by jQuery to handle rotating through them.
Let me know if that makes sense, if not I will clarify further. Thanks again!
I'd use the uComponents multi node tree picker for this for sure, you can filter the nodes (so the user cannot select the wrong doc types) and also set a maximum number of nodes selected if you need it too.
Where will the 'content' be picked from? You might already have this in your content structure (for example news), or you can include the content outside your website structure.
Hendy wrote a blog post a while back on side 'modules' not the same as you are trying to achieve but the concepts are similar http://blog.hendyracher.co.uk/sidebar-widgets-with-umbraco-v4/ Note that the 'macro container' and uComponents have been released since the blog post as mentioned in the comments.
Here is another example. This is a site that I built and follows a typical kind of content driven site that I build for clients. http://www.posillico.net/ I would love to be able to use Umbraco instead of the homegrown CMS I built there which is starting to get a bit dated since I don't have time to update the core.
The main idea is being able to take the projects within each sub-category of "contruction services" and be able to select specific ones to feature on the homepage in the large image area.
Similarly, being able to feature news items in the secondary teaser area at the bottom would be another area that would benefit from this "multi-select" functionality.
Both of these can be achieved fairly easily. The nice thing is once you have the basics of this working you can reuse the code on your new sites.
What you have shown on the link above 'In the news' 'Awards' 'Ground Breaking' is very similar to what Hendy is posting about in his blog.
I use this time and time again with a nice snippet of xslt which looks up the content tree to see which page has these 'modules' selected, this is a nice feature as it means that you / the client do not have to select the news/products for every single page as there can be a default selection further up the tree.
Looking at your site, i'd lay my Umbraco install out something like this:
Content
- Home
- Construction Services
- Civil
- Project 1
- Materials
- Project 3
- About Us
- News
- News 1
- News 2
- Health & Safety
- Contact Us
For this structure for each content type (construction, type, project, content page?) I would have a multi node tree picker that selected a news item for your area at the bottom, this is what I meant by already being in the content tree so differs from Hendys example somewhat.
If you've developed your own CMS in the past then I really doubt you'll have any problems getting your head around Umbraco and how to add this functionality. Maybe best just to give it a go, I imagine you'll get stuck at some point but you can get answers here pretty quickly.
Multiple content item references
I have only been using Umbraco for about a week now, but am loving it so far, and trying to learn everything I can so I can start pushing it into production. One thing I am struggling with is having multiple content references for a single document type. I know there are a few extensions that can do this (http://www.farmcode.org/post/2010/06/29/Multi-node-tree-picker-source-code-from-CodeGarden-2010.aspx) but I want to make sure I am not missing anything in the built-in functionality that would allow me to do this kind of thing. If it's not already built-in, does anyone know if this is something planned for the 5.0 release coming in 2011?
Hi Tom,
Glad you're enjoying your introduction to Umbraco.
The link you are referencing is a little out of date, the Multi Tree Node Picker is part of uComponents (version 2.0 released today) http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ucomponents the Multi Node Tree Picker is a great Data Type and I use it on most of my projects.
I'm not 100% from your post on what you're trying to achieve, maybe you could post the problem you're trying to solve and see what solutions are available, there's often a few ways to achieve the same task? There is a content picker that comes with the standard install but that only allows you to select one node.
Umbraco does not include 'everything' out the box (by design), so for most if not all projects you will have to install 3rd party packages or datatypes. These packages are all available from the Projects tab here and are built by members of the community.
Saying that, parts of uComponents are to be included in Umbraco v5 though it's not been specified which ones.
I certainly wouldn't hold back and wait until 5.0 as this is a fair way off and the current version of Umbraco is powerful as is.
That turned out to be a little bit of a ramble, hope the info helped!
Rich
Thanks for the response Rich! I actually started playing with uComponents but I will have to check out the new version. Character Limit (which is listed on the codeplex site) is a feature I was really looking forward to and was wondering when the new version would be released!
As far as what I am trying to accomplish, I would like to have a featured teaser on a homepage that does something similar to what you see at the top of IGN http://ps3.ign.com/ or the "Today's top stories" block on the UGO site http://www.ugo.com/ ; The difference is that while these have a static number of items (5 on ign and 4 on ugo) I would want to be able to include an unlimited number of content references, the front end would be handled by jQuery to handle rotating through them.
Let me know if that makes sense, if not I will clarify further. Thanks again!
Hey Tom,
I'd use the uComponents multi node tree picker for this for sure, you can filter the nodes (so the user cannot select the wrong doc types) and also set a maximum number of nodes selected if you need it too.
Where will the 'content' be picked from? You might already have this in your content structure (for example news), or you can include the content outside your website structure.
Hendy wrote a blog post a while back on side 'modules' not the same as you are trying to achieve but the concepts are similar http://blog.hendyracher.co.uk/sidebar-widgets-with-umbraco-v4/ Note that the 'macro container' and uComponents have been released since the blog post as mentioned in the comments.
Rich
Here is another example. This is a site that I built and follows a typical kind of content driven site that I build for clients. http://www.posillico.net/ I would love to be able to use Umbraco instead of the homegrown CMS I built there which is starting to get a bit dated since I don't have time to update the core.
The main idea is being able to take the projects within each sub-category of "contruction services" and be able to select specific ones to feature on the homepage in the large image area.
Similarly, being able to feature news items in the secondary teaser area at the bottom would be another area that would benefit from this "multi-select" functionality.
Hey Tom,
Both of these can be achieved fairly easily. The nice thing is once you have the basics of this working you can reuse the code on your new sites.
What you have shown on the link above 'In the news' 'Awards' 'Ground Breaking' is very similar to what Hendy is posting about in his blog.
I use this time and time again with a nice snippet of xslt which looks up the content tree to see which page has these 'modules' selected, this is a nice feature as it means that you / the client do not have to select the news/products for every single page as there can be a default selection further up the tree.
Looking at your site, i'd lay my Umbraco install out something like this:
Content
- Home
- Construction Services
- Civil
- Project 1
- Materials
- Project 3
- About Us
- News
- News 1
- News 2
- Health & Safety
- Contact Us
For this structure for each content type (construction, type, project, content page?) I would have a multi node tree picker that selected a news item for your area at the bottom, this is what I meant by already being in the content tree so differs from Hendys example somewhat.
If you've developed your own CMS in the past then I really doubt you'll have any problems getting your head around Umbraco and how to add this functionality. Maybe best just to give it a go, I imagine you'll get stuck at some point but you can get answers here pretty quickly.
Rich
Thanks for this Rich, above and beyond the kind of response I would expect. I'll let you know how things turn out with an update here later!
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