This post is more of a note to myself but may save someone else a lot of wasted time trying to track down why they can no longer save selected nodes in Umbraco. In a recent project I created a number of custom user controls for the Umbraco Dashboard, these user controls contained validations controls but I had overlooked adding the validationgroup property on the validation controls so when attempts were made to save or publish a node containing one of these user controls that didn’t validate, the changes would not save as the page could not be posted back to the server. The problem is not always immediately obvious if the user control that is not valid is on a different tab to the one you are on when attempting to save or publish.

I guess an alternative or complimentary method would be to display a Javascript alert notifying the user that there are still controls that don’t validate.

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I have recently needed to use the Umbraco datePicker control in a usercontrol I was creating however I kept getting presented with an “Unknown server tag ‘umbraco:datePicker” exception. After some digging around in the Umbraco Source it is confusingly not in the assembly I would have expected but it was in fact located in the cms.dll and not controls.dll. As a couple of other Umbracians posted this query a day or so after I found the solution I thought I would post it up for the benefit of others.

Simply include the following in your usercontrol:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="umbraco" Namespace="umbraco.controls" Assembly="cms" %>

and then use it as follows:

<umbraco:datePicker ID="datePicker1" runat="server" ShowTime="true"></umbraco:datePicker>

I hope this is of help to others and can be refactored asap to avoid any further confusion.

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There was a time not so long ago, when website developers were treated with almost as much reverence as pilots and surgeons. After all, without a website, your business was just not a player, non-existent, invisible to the world. No one had any idea as to what they did, or how they did it, just that they were able, as if by magic, to put our business into cyberspace in full view of a global audience.

There were pictures and there were words too. It was marvellous. Who will ever forget the day our website went live. But, as is life, we wanted more. A new product range, a change in pricing perhaps, or maybe even some customer feedback comments. Suddenly things got a little tricky. We were told that there was no development time available for at least two weeks, or the site would have to be rewritten as expansion was not part of the initial brief, blah blah. Bottom line? It cost money. Every change or tweak became an uphill struggle and a nightmare scenario.

Luckily all this is now a thing of the past. The reason? Content Management Systems, or CMS for short. These little beauties have given us the power now. No longer beholden to our developers, we proudly add, tweak and change to our hearts content and glory and revel in our new found freedom. And best of all, there’s no extra costs. involved.

From humble beginnings as a simple textual template editor tool, CMS has now really come of age and is simply an essential ingredient in any website design. Today’s systems are dynamic tools that give you the power to produce high quality web content without any programming knowledge. In the main, used via a simple menu system, CMS will allow you to add new pages of content and images, format your page design, add titles and navigation, edit existing pages, put in SEO meta data, allow for multiple users and let you roll back to previous versions if you make a mistake.

There are however, some rules to this heavenly scenario that should be observed at all costs.

1. Now that you have free reign, your web content should be written to be informative to your visitors of course, but it also must be search spider friendly. This is crucial to getting your website successfully indexed and ranked high by Google.
2. CMS systems can be widely varying in cost which will be determined by the power and flexibility you are looking for. The cheapest option might sound appealing but could prove to be a serious mistake when you realise that you really need much more flexibility and there is no doubt you will, so try to future proof if possible by picking a system that will not restrict your progress.
3. Is the system secure. You will need, if you are allowing multiple user access, to ensure you have sufficient overall control.
4. Does it work across all platforms? These days websites need to be seen on different browsers and mobile technology too.
5. Is there comprehensive support for you, because one thing is sure, you will need it at the most unlikeliest of times.

With all these possibilities factored in, you will find that the freedom, speed and cost savings you experience through installing a versatile CMS on your site will more than justify the price tag.

Keep an eye out for part two of this series on the topic of Content Management Systems.

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While working on my customisations to Tim Geyssens MailEngine I was looking for an accurate method of automatically creating a plain-text version of the HTML emails that were being sent out by the site. Further reading brought my attention to something called Markdown. After some hunting around with a little help from my friend Google I managed to find a markdown XSLT file. Using the XSLT I could transform my HTML email to plain-text with relative ease and accuracy. Of course in order to do this I would need a valid XML document and as my pages were already valid XHTML I had no problems there.

Here is my method for doing the conversion, all it requires is that you pass it the HTML you want to convert which must be valid XML:

/// <summary>
/// Converts to HTML to plain-text.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="HTML">The HTML.</param>
/// <returns>The plain text representation of the HTML</returns>
private static string ConvertToText(string HTML)
{
    string text = string.Empty;

    XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    XmlDocument xsl = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDoc.LoadXml(HTML);
    xsl.CreateEntityReference("nbsp");
    xsl.Load(System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("/xslt/Markdown.xslt"));

    //creating xslt
    XslTransform xslt = new XslTransform();
    xslt.Load(xsl, null, null);

    //creating stringwriter
    StringWriter writer = new System.IO.StringWriter();

    //Transform the xml.
    xslt.Transform(xmlDoc, null, writer, null);

    //return string
    text = writer.ToString();
    writer.Close();

    return text;
}

Download the XSLT file I used from here:

http://symphony-cms.com/downloads/xslt/file/20573/

I would love to hear from anyone that does this differently or if you can find any problems with the method I have chosen to implement for this solution.

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Some months back Tim Geyssens was kind enough to send me the source for his MailEngine addition to Umbraco before he released it on his blog. I made some customisations to the source to allow users to select templates and changed the filtering options slightly but other than that it worked jut fine for what I needed.

There was however one problem that became apparent when this was used in production. Sometimes, and apparently randomly the sending of mail would freeze when going to more than say 150 recipients. After a long time trying to track down the reason I stumbled across a post linking to the ‘SmtpClient does not gracefully close the underlying TCP/IP connection‘ issue on the Microsoft Connect website. I guessed it couldn’t do any harm to set the MaxTimeout property of the SmtpClient to 1 so I tried it and it seemed to work – so far so good however you should note the recent comment from someone with regards to using this method on IIS7.

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For me every day is a school day and every day I learn something new. Today the light shined brightly for me when I discovered a great time saving shortcut in Visual Studio to implement an Abstract Class or Interface in Visual Studio. Using the shortcut will populate all of the abstract class method signatures for you.

CTRL + > or you can use  SHIFT + ALT + F10

Here is an example of a new custom Application tree I was implementing for the Umbraco CMS:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco

{

public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

}
}

With your cursor at the end of the class signature you can then press CTRL + > or SHIFT + ALT + F10 and you will get a smart tag offering to implement the abstract class or interface, hit enter and the result is as follows:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco
{
public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

protected override void CreateRootNode(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTreeNode rootNode)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void Render(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTree tree)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void RenderJS(ref System.Text.StringBuilder Javascript)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}
}
}

A simple example of something that can be a huge time saver particularly when the inherited class or interface has a large number of methods to implement!

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A few weeks back I released my second package for the Umbraco CMS imaginatively called Media Sorter for Umbraco (does what it says on the tin!).

The package essentially adds a new context menu item to the Umbraco CMS dashboard to allow media items to be sorted alphanumerically. The Media Sorter is something I originally developed to save myself and my clients time when working with large media repositories in Umbraco. It helps keep things organised and makes media items quicker and easier to locate if they are kept in some sort of order.

I enjoy(ed) working on this project because I learnt a bit more about Umbraco Package Actions and found some limitations with the currently available Package Actions. As a result of the limitations I developed my own package action ‘Update Application Tree Package Action for Umbraco‘ to fulfil the requirements of my package.

I have released the source for this package on CodePlex under the Umbraco Extensions project.

Many thanks to Kim Andersen for his patience while I ironed out some issues he was having with the initial releases on .net 2.0.

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I have just finished another upgrade from umbraco 3.06 to v4.0.2.1 and hit a snag whereby whenever a user attempted to add a new media item after the upgrade they were presented with the following exception:

ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.ArgumentException: ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media

Source Error:

Stack Trace:

[ArgumentException: ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media]
   umbraco.cms.presentation.Create.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +415
   System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +15
   System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +33
   System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +99
   umbraco.BasePages.BasePage.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +12
   System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +47
   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1436

After a bit of digging I discovered the following Work Item on CodePlex and the following comment from jvisch which provided me with the solution:

1. Open the UI.xml file located in /umbraco/config/create
2. Search for the node with the alias ‘media‘
3. Change the alias to ‘Media’ with a capital M
4. Save the file
5. Restart the website by making a slight change to the web.config file and saving it

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I have recently been working on another package for the Umbraco CMS. During the course of packaging the extension I hit a problem with the existing package actions that were available via the core and the PackageActionContrib project.  You can easily add an Application Tree but none of them could successfully update an existing Application Tree during the uninstall process. As my package action modified an existing application tree in order to add a custom menu item I needed to write a new package action that could do this at install and then revert it during the uninstall process.

You can download the Update Application Tree Package Action and with a bit of luck this issue can be addressed at some point in the future or my package action can be submitted to the PackageActionContrib project for consideration. Make sure you drop the dll into your bin folder before you need to use the action.

Example package action usage:

<action runat="uninstall" undo="false" alias="UpdateAppTree" treeAlias="media" treeHandlerAssembly="umbraco" treeHandlerType="loadMedia" />

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When Umbraco 4 was first released I had issues with 2 of the upgrades from v3 in that the templates disappeared from the UI and clicking on any of the DocumentTypes resulted in an exception taking the form of “No node exists with id ’1040′”. Today I was working on the site again and it was bugging me so I checked the forums and found this post however it wasn’t resolved as far as I could tell.

I did a little digging around in the database and found some references in the cmsTemplate table to template master documents with the id 1040…bingo! I changed all references to a suitable master template that did exist and all of the above issues magically went away.

I thought it was too much of a coincidence for the node id in the exception to be the same for others as it was for me so I looked for a pattern in where this reference existed and they all seemed to be templates for what I think was the original Creative Website Starter (CWS) package. Would be interested in comments from others that might be able to confirm this.

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