Sunday 30 December 2012

Moving items around within a single Tridion environment

Think back of three key words you extracted out of the first notions you got when learning Tridion. It will not be a wild guess to say one of those key words would likely be 'Blueprinting'.

The Blueprinting hierarchy within Tridion is the skeleton of your implemenation, like the chassis of a car. Building a robust chassis will help the car when facing bumps in the road ;)

But the question now is... how to proceed when, for any reason which is not so relevant anymore, the initial Blueprinting hierarchy is not strong or extensible enough and you wish to transfer it into a new one that follows known best practices?

I do not have one answer for all the cases, but a lot of them are going to be helped by SDL Content Porter.

I am aware that many people have developed some "allergies" against Content Porter, but we should not underestimate its power for certain things; a good example is its Blueprinting awareness.

In this article, I will give you a couple of tricks and simple steps to follow when restructuring your Blueprinting hierarchy. That is to say, we are porting from and to the same environment, but from and to different Publications within that environment.

Wednesday 21 November 2012

Load Queue Override GUI Extension

How many times have you clicked impatiently on "Show Tasks" while the publishing queue was still loading??? I am not sure about you developers, but Tridion users... thousands! And I understand it! The world around us moves at a high pace... and so does our clicking finger! :)

Every hit on the button is making a call to the database; in a system with many publishing transactions and many concurrent users, this can have an impact on the system performance and stability.

How to solve this neatly? A GUI Extension!!!!

This post will show you the "what", "how" and "why" around the solution.

Functionality provided

While the publishing queue is being loaded, the following actions are executed:
  1. Disable the Show Tasks button 
  2. Disable the Reload button icon
  3. Show a progress message



When the publishing queue finishes loading, the following actions are executed:
  1. Enable the Show Tasks button
  2. Enable the Reload button icon
  3. Archive the progress message