AutoTag v1.3 released

12 Feb 2010

Ok, so following an email from Darren Ferguson; Umbraco MVP nominee, I finally got round to updating my AutoTags project.

Theres been some pretty hefty updates, mainly to the user interface. As the original UI was, well, rubbish!! Hopefully it looks a bit better anyway. I've also added better notifications when errors occur, as well as adding errors to the Umbraco Log table.

Also, as requested by an Umbraco community member, I have enabled the ability to choose when node properties are used for tag generation. By default, all properties are used, but its possible to limit the number of properties using a semi-colon seperated string in appSettings section of web.config, e.g:

You can download it from my read more

Get Node or Node ID by URL

30 Nov 2009

Hi guys
I know I haven't written any articles for a while, this is because I've changed jobs, moved house and been to the land down under for two weeks so I've been pretty busy!

This article; as the title suggests, is a short article demonstrating how to retrieve a node via the URL of a page. This has probably been covered before numerious times, but this is as much a reference for myself.
Moving on, most of you will probably be saying, why not use:

Node.GetCurrent();

Well, if you are using lightboxes to display content from a node, and want to use an property from the current node (not the lightbox node) within the lightbox, using Node.GetCurrent() will return the lightbox node.

The first (and most important) part is to get the URL. This can be done by using the Request.UrlReferrer.Segments collection...read more

Umbraco TinyURL Datatype

18 Sep 2009

Once again another short one all. I have developed a custom datatype for use with the Umbraco CMS which generates a shortened version of the page. This datatype send the current page tinyurl.com when the page is saved and saves the returned value as a property.
The value can then be retrieved as in exactly the same was as any other, e.g:

<xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/data[@alias='propertyName']" />

So thats it really, download it here or at my projects page at our.umbraco.org....read more

Umbraco problems with displaying Special characters

16 Sep 2009

Just a quick one this. I've been aware of this issue for a while but I've only just acted on it.
Basically with Umbraco v4.0.1 (and possibly others), if you enter a special character such as a degree symbol (°) in the RichTextEditor, the character would be replaced with the dreadful default square character when the page was published.

To get round this, open umbracoSettings.config in the config folder and replace:

<TidyCharEncoding>Raw</TidyCharEncoding>

with:

<TidyCharEncoding>UTF8</TidyCharEncoding>

You should now be able to save the special characters...read more

AutoTags Umbraco DataType

20 Aug 2009

One of my biggest irritations as a web developer is populating web pages with content. Ok, it needs to be done, but it can get a little tedious. One of the more tedious tasks are SEO, and page categorisation. So wouldn't it be good if you could automatically generate keywords that relate to the page content, categories for news articles and tags for blog posts?

With this in mind I have written a Custom DataType for the Umbraco CMS (Version 4) which does exactly this. I've ported Dan Grossman's Open Calais class; written in PHP, to the .Net Framework so it can be used with Umbraco. You can find Dan's PHP class here.

It takes the content from the body of the web page and using the OpenCalais API, generates a list of words which relate to the content. You can then select the words which...read more