Blogs posted in 2010
Setting custom settings for a property through code in EPiServer CMS R2 Beta
Previously I blogged about New property types in EPiServer CMS R2 Beta. It led to a little discussion in the comments. Specifically Erik Nordin asked if it was possible to set the custom settings through code.
New property types in EPiServer 6 CMS R2 Beta
EPiServer 6 CMS 6 R2 Beta comes with some pretty powerful editor focussed features such as personalisation and improved on page editing.
However there are some more subtle additions that can make administrators and developers lives easier. An example of this is the addition of two new property types called "Drop-down list" [EPiServer.SpecializedProperties.PropertyDropDownList] and "Select list (multiple selection)" [EPiServer.SpecializedProperties.PropertyCheckBoxList].
EPiServer license management across environments
As we all know whether EPiServer is running in a development, test or prod environment it needs a license to run. Normally this is done by saving the "License.config" file in the root of the application. License management can sometimes be a pain as you always need the license file but it needs to be different on each environment.
EPiServer Express – an idea
Before I start I would like to state that this post contains thoughts that are my own and are not endorsed by EPiServer or my company in any way.
Securing EPiServer edit and admin mode by IP address
Recently I read an EPiServer forum post about securing EPiServer edit and admin mode. If I understood the post correctly then there is a public facing EPiServer site, using the standard SQL providers. The requirement was to prevent access to edit and admin mode to all but a restricted set of IP addresses.
Enabling Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) in EPiServer
Following on from Ben Morris' blog about Converting EPiServer 6 to use claims-based authentication with WIF I was intrigued to see if it was possible to create a role and membership provider that allowed us to use WIF in EPiServer with little or no modification apart from configuration changes.
Checklist for setting up Windows Authentication in EPiServer on a development machine
If you want to skip the long descriptions and prefer a list then simply skip to the list at the bottom of the page.
I was setting up windows authentication for an EPiServer site on my development machine. The requirement was simple: have a windows authenticated site, with no anonymous access and therefore no log in. It was a fairly new build and I'd not used the windows membership and role providers before on this particular machine. There turned out to be quite a few steps in the end so I thought I'd write about them here. All steps are designed for Windows 7 / IIS7.x but can easily be replicated on previous versions of Windows.
Really SEO friendly URLs
The problem
EPiServer has great functionality for managing SEO friendly URLs where the user can effectively manage their own URL structure such as:
http://www.mysite.com/news/europe/uk/liverpool/football-news-item/
In most cases this works really well. However I was recently working with SEO consultant David Deutsch on a project where search engine rankings are paramount to the success of the business. His requirement was to have reallyfriendly URLs for SEO purposes.
Enhancing the “Create New” screen in EPiServer - part II
I was fortunate enough to attended the EPiServer Partner Summit 2010 and met some great people and saw some inspiring presentations. One session in particular that got my mind thinking was the codemania session. I'd recently blogged about Enchancing the Create New screen in EPiServer. One of the bigger issues with the solution was that we were using properties to store the path to the preview and thumbnail images and that the thumbnail/preview images themselves had to be manually created. I thought it would be great to automatically generate the images using the most recently published pages of each type as a reference. It turns out that codemania provided all the answers…
Enhancing the "Create New" screen in EPiServer
In any reasonable sized EPiServer installation its not uncommon that there are a lot of page types available when creating a new page. Often there are a bewildering array of page names/descriptions so I wanted to give editors a visual reference on the content they are creating. I decided to create a simple enhancement to the standard "Create New" screen in EPiServer which would allow users to see an image of the page before they create it.
Customising the EPiServer UI
EPiServer provides a powerful framework for adding to the edit and admin mode UI. But this doesn’t always cover our needs and occasionally a requirement pops up that means we have to change the EPiServer UI itself. A great thing about EPiServer is that all the pages and controls that make up the EPiServer UI are installed along with the binaries so we should be able to edit these to meet our exact requirements. I've not seen any official guidelines about this so I thought I'd put together an example on how I've achieved this.
Automatically convert external links to the current site into internal links
Recently I spoke to a client who had recently migrated to EPiServer from another CMS. They'd noticed that the number of internal broken links was going up rather than down after the migration. I thought that this was strange as EPiServer maintains all internal links by reference so if a page is moved in the page tree then it's link is automatically updated.