Delivering Static HTML5 Apps from Zip Files in Episerver's Media Library using Partial Routing

Yeah, so the title seems like a mouthful but it's really quite simple. A prospective customer of mine wanted to know if we could provide a better way of uploading some in-house developed HTML5 apps (large, searchable libraries of content made by another team, but I won't go too deep into why they're not just putting that content directly into the CMS).

Their current solution involves a drawn-out process of replicating folders in SharePoint, uploading each folder's files, go back, rinse, & repeat. Unfortunately, these apps are also updated every few weeks which means that the whole process must be repeated for every app, every month, every year. Sounds like a lot of work to me, so I wrote up a quick proof-of-concept solution that I think tidies up the process nicely.

For this project, I'm going to use Foundation as the base site and add in a couple of models and a partial router to get these things working. Let's get started!

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.

Episerver Shared Content with *Partial* Override Control

I was asked to create a quick proof of concept for sharing content between sites in Episerver. While there are many ways to do this, I wanted to create one that allowed for only part of the content to be overridden while the rest was enforced from the parent. The View shows how the output to the page can be determined on whether there is content available.

I don't claim it to be perfect nor production-ready. Just a bit of fun and a PoC.

Episerver Automatic Image Tagging with Microsoft Cognitive Services

I must admit I'm enjoying messing around with Microsoft's Cognitive Services, as is probably evidenced by the SMS App I made for my Dad, I also figured I could turn this into a practical application for work as well.

I'm willing to bet that most organizations are still a bit behind on the content strategy curve at this point and aren't adequately tagging their content and images. So I decided to build out a demo-ware / proof of concept for auto-tagging images, which will soon grow into processing content text, possibly as an add-on for the community. We'll see.

It's worth noting that the results that come back are suspect at best. Machine-based tagging should be looked at much like we look at machine-translation. It'll get close, but if you use it then there should be some human moderation put into play. Either pre-publish or post-publish doesn't matter, just know that you're not going to get 100% accuracy. You should expect some tags you'll want to remove and that you'll want to step in and add your own as well.

Still, I find that the tagger inserts values that are likely helpful as well as likely un-thought-of by some authors.

A Comprehensive Guide to using Generated .NET Content Types with Ektron CMS 8.5+

The example I'm creating below is for output of images in a list, as though I were going to make a gallery. Keep in mind that there are other things I would do when actually creating a gallery, so this is by no means completed code in that regard. It is, however, a very good and simple illustration for how to retrieve and handle content from Ektron in the most .NET way possible (without a lot more separation of concerns).