Adding providers to Sitefinity content modules (News, Images,...) - sitefinity

Anyone familiar with adding providers to content modules?
I have two Sitefinity sites that I want to share the news content items of, one with the other. So when I add news content and images to one, I want to show the full content items in the other.

Sitefinity does offer their multisite management module but it looks like its only available for certain editions as a $5000 add on. Not sure what the budget is but maybe that's worth it since it allows the sharing of content between sites.
If not what we had proposed as a potential solution for this to a client was to have one site be the entry point for news items and just run the news lists and details pages off the built in widget templates. Then on the other site we wanted to share the content with, create a custom .ascx or Sitefinity mvc widget to pull the news items from the other site using the built in web services on that site. You'd probably have to write a couple controls for it, one to get the list and one to pull the details but its a poor man's way to get shared content without writing a custom content provider or paying for multisite.
Here's some documentation on using the web services:
http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/svetlayankova/posts/svetla-yankovas-blog/2011/11/01/getting_started_with_restful_services_in_sitefinity
http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/documentationarticles/developers-guide/deep-dive/client-side-programming

Related

Launching a new Shopify theme and the best approach

I am seeking guidance on the best way to introduce a new theme onto an already complex e-commerce Shopify website.
I am new to the Shopify go-live process, this is the first time I am going to launch a new theme that I have built. I understand the building process and could do with some clarification on the go-live steps.
The job:
A complex e-commerce company has had us build a new design and way of navigating through to product pages. Introducing new collections and tags. There are also new pages and will be a dramatic change to URLs from an SEO point of view.
The store will remain in the same place, on their server, the same domain name, in their control.
I need to be able to provide them with an importable version of our development store, with guidance on how to push this live without breaking and allowing us to test the site on the live-server before opening it up to the users.
The implementation:
I have created the store, the pages, the collections, the tags, all the bells and whistles.
I have uploaded their latest database of products onto the development store and set these up into the collections and store filters.
The question:
How do I put this live onto the old store with the least down-time & having the ability to test the newly created store before customers can see it?
The break-down of the question:
What files need packaging? What is the easiest way to package up these files for the client company? What is the best way to install the packaged files? What is the best way to test the website?
One last concern:
Is it possible to keep the existing stores orders and customer user profiles?
You can preview the theme and populate data from each Section (if theme you make is a sectioned-theme). You can compiled the theme from you development and upload to their store, you don't have to send it live.

Adding ecommerce options to existing site using PrestaShop

What I intend to do is to keep my website with the CMS that I have in place for 12 years because last year I've redesigned it and I've even implemented a very nice AMP version.
To my existing site which includes also product pages, I would like to integrate an ecommerce solution and the one that I like the most is Presta Shop.
Rather than migrating the content to Presta Shop, I want to just bring the stock, price, quantity and add to cart to the existing site via php by calling Presta Shop and fetching specific product IDs.
Is this possible?
So far I didn't find anything about how could this be achieved.
I've read that it could be done in Magento, but nothing for Presta Shop.
Grateful if you have any insights on this.
Many thanks,
Mihai Bocsaru
You have few options, you can use PrestaShop API via Webservice, you can also create your store in some subdirectory and copy layout from your current website
Third option would be to have PrestaShop installation on the same server and just get all the information data from its database, of course entire checkout process should be handled via PrestaShop, this is why most common scenario is to just use website layout with proper e-commerce addition, downside of those two options is that you'll have two administration panels but i guess it's not that big issue
Thank you, Krystian!
I've presented the client the benefits of having the Presta Shop run on its own folder or sub-domain, but he wants it within the site.
We might have to integrate Presta Shop ecommerce options that I've mentioned on this topic within the current web pages and adjust the look and feel of the checkout pages to match the site layout (registration, login, checkout etc.).
I will consider involving you in settings this up.

Managing users with Pirhana CMS

What is the best way to manage users with PirhanaCMS?
I would like to prevent some users from adding content (posts etc...) in some categories and prevent that some sites be listed for some users. (For people who don't know it, PirhanaCMS is a micro CMS programmer oriented).
I would like to use the sites features because I'm working on a project in which I'll have a "network" of several sites managed by different entities of an organization. I would like that each entity be only able to see its own site but that the big organization at the top be able to manage every sites. Moreover, within a site I would like that some users be only able to edit some part of the site.
Are these features built-in ? Otherwise what is the best way to implement them myself around the CMS ?
I am using ASP.NET MVC 4 and EF5.
If you take a look at System > Permissions in the manager area you can see that there are permissions you can give to groups for different parts of the manager interface.
There's however currently no built in support for restricting access to different site trees, but you are free to add a feature request for this at GitHub or maybe participate by implementing it and sending a pull request!

How can I convert a non-CMS web application to a Sitefinity managed application?

I am in the process of converting a web application that has been in play for some time into a Sitefinity 4 managed site. There is plenty of documentation on how to use the software to CREATE a new site, but I've found precious little that describes the process of how to migrate from non-cms to Sitefinity.
So - specifically, I would like some guidance on the process of conversion from non-managed to managed. I've been searching google and the Sitefinity forums, etc. but finding nothing except how to migrate from one version of Sitefinity to another - not what I'm trying to do.
Any leads for web sites to visit or documentation pages to read would be very helpful.
You'll have to bite the bullet and invest more resources at the beginning of your project and not release anything for some period of time. You won't be able to drive your car without fundamental components. The same principle applies here.
Whatever your requirements are, you will either have to hack around the CMS and then fix the hacks later, or do it properly from the very start.
Look at your existing site and break it down into smaller chunks
Consult Sitefinity documentation/partners/freelancers on how your existing content can be migrated onto Sitefinity platform
Task up the migration and start implementing
This is very rough guideline, but so are your requirements.
To summarise, there is no quick way. You'll have to do it properly form the start, or invest more resources later on bug/hack fixing.
If we have Sitefinity at the root of the application, we cannot,
according to Sitefinity, have any pages not managed by SF
That's not entirely correct. Sitefinity allows you to add "external pages", meaning that you can create odes in your sitemap which would like to external pages. Thus, your navigation in Sitefinity would show a complete website page structure, while some of the pages in that structure would actually be linking to external ones.
It would be absolutely easy and quick task to create your page structure programatically.
actually this is quite simple to achieve. Sitefinity is completely dynamic CMS (meaning, no real files). The implementation uses RoutingEngine and VirtualPathProvider to achieve this. What this in reality means is that you have two solid and standard extension points to split the site in "sitefinity managed part" and "custom managed part".
So, a very simple way to do this is to simply register a route (more info here: ASP.NET routing) before the SitefinityPageRoute, as SitefinityPageRoute will throw 404 if it cannot find a page.
So, let's say you register a route "~/mystuff" before SitefinityPageRoute, all the requests that start with "~/mystuff" will first go to your RouteHandler where you can decide to handle them (write to http response) or do nothing and let it fell down to Sitefinity routes.
Another way is of course to implement a custom VirtualPathProvider, however, this may be an overkill if you simply want some pages to be handled differently.
All this being said, it's obvious that pages not handled by Sitefinity will not be handled by Sitefinity :) (so, no page editor, no workflows, no translations, no widgets, no templates, no themes).

Any SharePoint geek to comment on architecture?

We are working with an existing SharePoint solution for a Company (its an Intranet). Now, the company is splitting into two and so is their intranet. Each company, of these two, from now on will have their own Intranet. So, idea is to split this Intranet (which is just a web application) into two web applications. But wait, these companies will also have some information to share in between. So, the idea is to put the shared information (Administrative stuff etc) into a separate web application. So, we have three web apps so far.
Previously, Company's intranet was managing the data of about 50 facilities in the form of Subsites. Now, according to new design, each web application will have 25 facilities each. In other words, each company will have 25 facilities. But, problem is that each facility is having large amounts of data almost 5GB+. So, its not possible for me to put the restriction quota at the site level. Although, we can put restriction on the size at SiteCollection level (as per my understanding). So, the idea so far is to create one site collection for each facility, it means we will have 25 site collections in a web applications. Navigation could be a nightmare. But, can we solve navigation problem with managed path etc?
any other suggestions/improvements will be warmly welcome and appreciated! Even your little comment may help me to improve my design ;)
In the proposed design, you will have to manually setup the navigation (managed paths will probably not help unless you want to have something other than /sites/ in the url).
I do question why you now have to split each of the facilities into their own site collection when, before the split, subsites worked. I would only recommend each facility be a unique site collection if you can forsee being asked to move facilities between the two new companies.