Moving the ImageMap editor custom property to EPiServer 5

I was recently asked by a collegue of mine to see if I could help him move the custom EPiServer image map property to his current EPiServer 5 project (originally built for EPiServer CMS 6, see EPiServer custom property: Allowing web editors to create image maps with flexible hot spot areas). There were a few issues with the JavaScript not working as intended, as well …

Unsupported languages: Arabic, Tigrinya or Chinese characters in SiteSeeker search result using EPiServer

The latest version of the SiteSeeker search engine supports indexing and searching in a variety of different languages; however, languages that are not using the latin alphabet, for instance arabic, hebrew, japanese as well as chinese, cannot be indexed. If you still try, you will be getting a bunch of nonsense characters instead of your expected text for each hit. One way of solving this …

Deploying an EPiServer website in a load balanced environment using master slave licenses without downtime for visitors

When working with large EPiServer websites having hundreds of tousands of visitors each month, you will want to make sure that you get as little downtime as possible while deploying your new releases; especially if the website’s content is of a nature that downtime may cause unnecessary damage, financial or otherwise, to the visitors. As these large websites are likely to run in load balanced …

Duplicate IIS 7.5 request filtering rules causes useless standard IIS 500 error page

We’ve been having loads of meaningless search engine indexing traffic caused by various web crawlers from around the world, resulting in unnecessary load on the production servers in my current project; meaningless in the sense that the site is mainly in swedish and hence rather uninteresting for people living in for instance Russia, Ukraine or Kazakhstan, where these engines are popular. A simple way to …

Short notes on mass updating the EPiServer AccessControlList from codebehind or directly in the database

Our client recently went through a few rather large organizational changes which naturally had some rippling effects running down into the security management of their EPiServer based website; i.e. when the editor role responsible for national content no longer could be considered an independant organization, but rather had to be merged into one of the Swedish county regions used on the site, we had to …

Simple adapter for showing hidden EPiServer properties in edit mode for administrators

The project in which I am currently working has an elaborate custom built system for allowing web editors to plan, review and discuss their articles in EPiServer‘s edit mode (as described by my collegue Stefan Forsberg in his post series about Reviewing pages in EPiServer). For this functionality to work, we are maintaining a number of hidden properties which are for instance linking together published …

How to get URL to FuBuMVC input model endpoint in a view

I wrote a small extension method for retrieving the URL to an input model endpoint in FuBuMVC together with my collegue Christer Bermar today. What we wanted to achieve was to have the relative address without the leading slash added to a custom attribute placed on a span tag. Note: If you don’t enjoy reinventing wheels, please have a look at Josh’s comment below and …

EPiServer custom property: Allowing web editors to create image maps with flexible hot spot areas

This is something that I developed mostly together with a two of my collegues* at Valtech in Stockholm before the summer holidays. It will be added to the production environment of the Swedish national health care website 1177.se some time early this fall; most likely in a different form. It was rather fun coding, so I asked and got permission from Inera (the client) to …

How to open those EPiServer Edit Mode selector browser popups in your custom properties

Constructing custom properties for EPiServer often gets you to a point where you would much rather just use built-in EPiServer functionality instead of reinventing wheels; especially when it comes to things such as adding page selectors, XForms selectors, or just for picking things like files or images from the EPiServer VPPs. I have assembled some notes on a few of the ways of how to …

Short and simple: Note-to-self on selecting the proper TableRowLayout in EPiServer Edit Mode for custom properties

Styling the EPiServer edit mode table layout to make your custom properties look pretty may not always be as easy as one would like. Even though it works well for smaller fields, if you are creating a property of the wider and higher proportions it will probably turn out rather bad if you are using EPiServer’s default table layout in the Edit tab. This will …

EPiServer CustomProperty: jQuery image slide show with HTML captions and smooth transitions using Dev7studios Nivo Slider

While searching for a pretty looking image slide show plugin that would not need me to have a Flash player installed on the client computer, or on the client iPad for that matter, I stumbled across an interesting piece of jQuery; the Nivo Slider from Dev7studios. While there are plenty of WordPress plugins using the Nivo Slider (none of the ones I tried actually working …

How to make EPiServer surveil your config files notifying you on change

I have been a little bit dry on coding inspiration lately, until the other day when my collegue Karl Ahlin gave me an interesting idea concerning monitoring of configuration files. While I enjoyed coding it, I will leave it unsaid if and where it could actually create value. There may still be a few what ifs with the approach, and some of it may be …

Visual aid for finding page usages directly in EPiServer edit mode page tree extending node tooltips

Recently, I have found myself wanting to know what pages are referencing certain other pages, or sub pages for that matter, while surfing around in the EPiServer edit mode. Having worked with control adapters to extend built-in EPiServer functionality quite a lot lately, I decided to create a simple one that would make my life easier. Code at GitHub as usual. There is really nothing …

Think things through, or: Simple way to 404 Not Found instead of EPiServer login screen for unpublished pages

I spent some time today attempting to make visitors land on a custom 404 Not Found error page when surfing to EPiServer pages that are no longer published; i.e. pages where the StopPublish date has passed (click here to skip my rant and go directly to the solution). The behaviour that we were experiencing on our site was an automatic redirect to EPiServer’s /Util/login.aspx with …

Revisited and improved: PageType based filtering of EPiServer’s EditMode PageTree

Some time ago I developed a small plug-in to EPiServer‘s edit mode page tree, allowing web editors to filter its pages based on all available page types. I decided to spend this weekend in the sun on my balcony with my laptop extending the functionality a great deal. The code is as usual available over at GitHub, and also as a NuGet package in the …

Being friends with the PropertyControlClassFactory, or: 101 ways to change EPiServer built-in property appearances

As I have been playing around with using ControlAdapters to change the rendering of built-in EPiServer properties lately, I got curious on what else I could possible do to modify them. As it turns out, the EPiServer PropertyControlClassFactory is a great ally in doing this. Hence, this post mostly revolves around different ways of getting it to do what you want. The example source code …

The <EPiServer:Property .. /> just for fun, what output really gets generated for those PageData Property Members?

I created a few test page types along with some templates and EPiServer pages in order to test outputs from <EPiServer:Property .. />. The HTML comments are not part of the output, obviously, and I cleaned away attributes such as ids, inline styles and CSS classes. Furthermore, I chose to be blind to how useful outputting some of these properties like this really is; you …

How to embed EPiServer resources such as GuiPlugIns and Pages together with Images, JavaScripts and Stylesheets in droppable assembly binaries

Recently I got slapped back into reality receiving a Twitter message from my collegue Patrik Akselsson in which he kindly asked me to hand him a GitHub link to the code from one of my blog posts. Being long overdue uploading my code into a public repository and constructing NuGet packages for my EPiServer features, I decided to do so for all my relevant posts. …

Complete and concrete example of what an ASP.NET WebForms Model-View-Presenter project may look like using StructureMap, NUnit and AutoMoq

For quite some time now I have been thinking of creating some sort of sample project to show how a Model-View-Presenter approach may be used in an ASP.NET WebForms project. Lots of what is out there on this subject seem to be rather fluffy in nature, bits and pieces, not really giving you everything that you need; especially if you have not worked with a …