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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1. I have been doing more and more work with Wordpress recently so I was keen to take on any work that could keep my momentum going in this area.
2. I respect what the site owner is doing and the causes he is supporting over the coming months

If you would like to know more about Mark Bowness and his mission to give up alcohol for twelve months in order to develop his spirit, mind and body you can watch his introductory YouTube video below and checkout www.dontbuythismanapint.com. Mark is making maximum use of social media to support this challenge so you can also follow him via Twitter, Facebook, RSS and YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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1. Adding jQuery to a custom Wordpress theme I have been doing a little bit of Wordpress work...

Usage:

I first needed to locate the following line in my head.php file:

<?php wp_head(); ?>

Then before the call to this function I can add my call to the wp_enqueue_script function so that we end up with the following:

<?php wp_enqueue_script("jquery"); ?>
<?php wp_head(); ?>

What this does is includes the Wordpress instance of jQuery however it is arguable about the efficiency of this method over loading it direct from Google servers since if everyone used this method users would not need to take the hit downloading the file as there would be a greater chance of the file aready being in their cache. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into more detail on this however if you are interested in reading more you may want to swing by Encosia and read 3 reasons why you should let Google host jQuery for you. If you want to opt for this method you can simply amend the above example as follows:

<?php
 wp_deregister_script('jquery');
 wp_register_script('jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js', false, '1.3.2');
 wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
?>
<?php wp_head(); ?>

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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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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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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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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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After referring two customers already and carrying out integration work for two separate sites I made the decision to become a Sage Pay Partner and promote them as my recommended Payment Service Provider to any future clients.

I can now offer the following benefits:

• Affordable transaction processing – you can benefit from their flat rate
• Pricing with no set up fees, no annual fees and no transaction charges
• Rates among the lowest in the business
• High levels of security
• Fraud prevention:  Ensure that your business is protected from fraud with the Sage Pay range of risk management services
• Reliable and available service:  Sage Pay infrastructure and disaster recovery procedures ensure that you can benefit from a highly reliable service

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