Joseph Anderson's Blog

It's my pleasure to annouce new templates available for Sitefinity. I adjusted some from www.freecsstemplates.org and I made them work with Sitefinity. To download them, check out my templates page.

Did you know that you can use web services with Sitefinity? It is actually pretty simple. You just add a web reference to your project, add the necessary code for a web service and make a user control that binds to the web service. Take a look at this sample project about BindingToXmlWebService. To deploy it, follow these steps:

 

1. Copy the App_WebResources folder to your project
2. Make default.aspx and the code behind file into a user control
3. Upload the user control to Sitefinity

Optionally, you can add RadAjax to your grid by using this demo as an example.

When I first used the login controls for Sitefinity, I was very surprised that a Password Recovery control was not included. This can be easily implemented into the CMS by following these instructions:

1. Create a new user control and drop a Password Recovery control onto the page. Make sure it is ID property is set to "passwordrecovery1"
2. Press F7 and add this code after the Page_Load method:

public PasswordRecovery PasswordRecovery
    {
        get
        {
            return this.PasswordRecovery1;
        }
        set
        {
            this.PasswordRecovery1 = value;
        }
    }

This code will create a new instance of Password Recovery and using the get/set accessors, make all the properties from Visual Studio accessible through Sitefinity. Even if this were dropped in a master page in a non-Sitefinity project, you would still see the public properties. When user controls are dropped onto content pages, you cannot edit them directly on the content page unless public properties are exposed. You can also follow this pattern for other controls, such as the Change Password control, if you want to use them in Sitefinity and gain access to those properties.

After following these steps, upload the control to Sitefinity. When you click on the edit button, you will notice a edit button on the next screen below the ID property. Click on it and you will see all the properties out of Visual Studio. For a code example, please view my downloads page.

It is simple to wrap a 3rd party control into a user control and wrap it into Sitefinity. In this particular example, I have used the trial version GridFX. You can access it on my downloads page. Here is a high level overview of how it is done:

1. As my datasource, I have used a XML file in the App_Data folder. Copy the XML file from the App_Data folder in my project to your project
2. Copy the bin files from my project to your project. Keep in mind that I have excluded the bin files from my download. You can easily download the necessary bin files at Software FX's Website
3. Upload the user control to Sitefinity and insert it on your page. For more info on working with user controls, please view this online video.

The following user control project will keep track of how many times a user clicked on an advertisement. This information is stored in a text file called AdResponse.txt in the App_Data folder.  Please follow these steps to deploy the control:  

1. Copy the Images folder into your application
2. Copy the advertisements.xml into the App_Data folder
3. Upload the ClickTracking user control from a page in SitefinityCopy adredirect.aspx to the root of your application (next to default.aspx) 

You must alter the advertisements.xml file to change the images: 

1. Go to this file: App_Data/advertisements.xml
2. Edit the <images> property to change the location of the image

For more information, this KB article.

When applying for jobs, have you ever applied for so many that you have lost track? Has someone ever called you an you just don't remember applying for the job? Well, no more! Using my job application module, you can easily upload your applications and keep track of job opportunities and interviews! Check out this demo on my website for CareerPath 1.0

To request a copy of this module, please e-mail me at joe@josephmanderson.com

I have had many Sitefinity users ask me about the learning curve with Nolics. Although the popular database mapping engine is used for many of the modules in the CMS, you can make modules without them. If you take a apart a module, you will see that you are placing user controls on the website, along with their code-behind, and a Nolics data layer to make the table for you. You could just as easily, however, make the database table in your database and just drop the control on there.

For this project, I just made a new website. I created a new database and I dragged and dropped the Telerik controls onto the page. Since Sitefinity comes with the .dll files, you just need to throw a user control onto the page. For the datasource, I just named it Sitefinity because that is the name in the connection string of a standard Sitefinity website. The connection string in the project should match the connection string in your website. When you make the table in your database, it should have the same name and columns that the one in your project has. To see this module in action, take a look form. I have included the code using the image and documents module on the Downloads section of the Downloads tab, so let me know what you think.

Creating an e-mail form in Sitefinity is very simple by following these steps:

1. On the .aspx page, make a textbox for the from e-mail, a textbox the the CC e-mail, a textbox for subject and a textbox for the body.
   
2. Import the system.web.mail class in your code-behind.
3. Add a public property for SMTP and a public property for the "To" E-Mail.
4. Add code to make the to, from, body, and subject info come from the textboxes
5. Add code to make the SMTP send the message.
   

For more detailed instructions, download this e-mail form user control . Please note that this is also the one used on my website.