Making Episerver Categories More...Useful.

Episerver's categories work fine for what they do, but they're crammed into the legacy Admin area and, compared to the rest of the platform, feel a bit dated to me.

Coming from the Ektron world, the comparative Taxonomy functionality was very front-and-center. While Ektron's eventually came to be over-used (and abused) in any number of implementations, categorization of content using pre-defined lists and structures is still important to many organizations.

If you need the hierarchy, then Episerver's Category property works well for that. But sometimes I don't really need hierarchy so much as I need to manage somewhat flat lists of categories - not all of which are really applicable to all content.

In addition, I may sometimes want to allow multiple selections from that list while at other times it needs to be an exclusive selection. Enter ISelectionFactory.

What follows is a bit of a thought experiment that shows how to use an external data source to feed a selection factory while experimenting with using Episerver Categories as the source.

Hijacking Episerver Find's Unified Search Text

I'm going to sort of build onto @kennygutierrez's recent quick-tip post regarding limiting indexing with your developer Find index with a Find tip of my own.

In the past few weeks, I've had a need to inject my own logic into how Find aggregates text for its UnifiedSearch. I won't get into the specifics of what I was doing (it would raise some questions as well as some eyebrows, to be honest), but I'd like to share the solution I found in the Episerver forums (sorry that I didn't save which post and therefore can't credit the poster, though I certainly owe them a drink).

There will only be a couple of short code snippets with this as it's really an elegantly simple, yet quite powerful solution.