Morten Bock

Codegarden Session: E-commerce Direction

Morten Bock — Fri, 11 May 2007 12:57:06 +0100

Here on day 2 of Codegarden, all sessions are created in what they call "Open Space" which is a forum where everyone can suggest a session that they want to hold, or they want to listen to.

Gert Abildskov suggested an E-commerce session to discuss the future of the E-commerce extension, which has been floating around the community, but has never really found a home, so to speak. The extension was originally built as a framework that could be enable umbraco developers to create e-shop facilities. The problem/challenge so far has been, that its pretty diffcult to get started with the extension, and that what's really needed out there is an extension that is plug-n-play for a simple shop.

I've entered in a group with the purpose of trying to define what the E-commerce extension should develop into. The first things to be done are creating a repository on Codeplex and opening the discussion on how to proceed. So look out for news on this subject.

Codegarden Session: Custom Datatypes

Morten Bock — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:08:34 +0100

Version 3 ships with a new datatype that functions as a Usercontrol Wrapper. This means that you dont actually have to think about saving the values to the Umbraco DB.

So when is this usefull?

Actually this makes it possible to apply security on document properties. Because you just make a usecontrol that defines the UI, you can actually check to see which type of user is logged in, thus deciding wether the user should be allowed to see to property.

It also makes it easier to make a datatype that uses external data to decide which data to display in the property.

Other usage examples from the session was making a usercontrol to list childnodes with paging for high volume areas of the site, and building a small messaging system where you can pick a user an let them know that the page needs to be reviewed.

Niels also commented on the possibilities of placing usercontrols in the dashboard, and mentioned that version 3 supports tabbed dasboard controls. Neat!