Content reuse in Sitecore 7

Question

Currently working in SC7 where I have implemented a kind of scaffolding so that editors can add an article to a page and add sections and paragraphs under it. You get the idea, html5 stuff...

Now, the problem... Editors are working in Page Editor:

Suppose you make a new page, and add an article. It has a title, hero image on top and an introduction. You choose to create new content and I save it in an ItemBucket called ContenStore where I store all my articles, sections, paragraphs... The SC7 way to use the search if they want to re-use any of that content.

Suppose my editor creates another new page, and he wants to re-use a section from the content store. He will find the section but when he has placed it on the page, non of the paragraphs that were on the original section show up... Of course not, since I guess the layout details are saved on the context item level and not on that section level...

Has anyone tackled this problem before? A sublayout (or rendering) should be able to remeber what layout details it has, so that if you re-use it, all the items it had originally are put in its placeholders again as well, and this recursively of course...

Any thoughts welcome...

Erwin

Answer 1

The problem you describe is not new to Sitecore 7. You would have the same problem in Sitecore 6, you would just have to go through the additional effort of keeping your content organized. This is a fundamental limitation of Sitecore's presentation framework.

I have worked around similar problems before by using Presentation Inversion of Control. (I should probably write an update for that since the rules engine approach no longer works)

I believe that Cognifide is doing something similar with the "Composites" in their Zen Garden, but instead of using a dummy layout they use an empty layout so any item can be opened as a page. Then they added a custom experience button which navigates to that non-page content item within the page editor. (Note that this is speculation based on a brief demo that I saw).

Thomas Eldblom also blogged years ago about what he called Composite Layouts. It's similar to PIoC, but puts the presentation settings on a special rendering type.

In short, there are ways to achieve what you want, but they all involve custom development and will require extra attention to maintain a smooth page editor experience.