Friday 26 November 2010

Is gaming dumbing down?

Many say that Kinect isn't for hardcore gamers because they like to sit on their arses, twiddle their thumbs and exert as little effort as possible. Not so; as this gamer demonstrates:

This has been doing the rounds but gems like these need to be showcased.

Thursday 25 November 2010

Location Based Search with FindPagesByCriteria

This is a quick follow on from my last post on Location Based Search with EasySearch.

Proximity search using standard EPiServer functionality is a lot easier since we can do numeric range searches with FindPagesByCriteria. All we need is a helper class which does the geo-stuff for you.

Friday 5 November 2010

An approach to Content Modelling with EPiServer CMS 6

Trying to avoid this!
How content is managed and presented are two different functions within content management systems. An obvious statement, well yes: however, complexity rears its head once you start to look at how each CMS or WCM or WCMS (take your pick) supports these activities.

Enterprise CMSs generally follow a strong separation between the content storage and management, and content presentation layers. For content storage there are open source technologies like Apache Jackrabbit and JCR which serve to store, provide an interface to and version content structures; including relational hierarchies.  For content management there are rich editor interfaces which leverage the storage mechanism capabilities. For content presentation, there are technologies which work well with the notion of hierarchical content model such as MVC frameworks.

However, with EPiServer CMS the distinction is not as clearly defined with its page tree and web forms implementation. The page tree works very well in scenarios where there is a tight coupling between pages and page data. In cases where there is a relational content model – a kind of domain model for content - this doesn’t really fit.

So how do you go about modelling a content tree with hierarchical, referential relationships in EPiServer CMS 6?