GatherContent for Sitefinity - some use cases
It's been a while since we released GatherContent Connector for Sitefinity.
While we must admit we have a long way to go still, there are quite a few interesting use cases that the connector helped us with.
Transform Lists to dynamic content
A telecom client had about 500 content pieces that were stored in Lists (the built-in Lists module).
However, the issue was, that Lists have some limitations (consulting?).
So we quickly came to the conclusion we should switch to dynamic content instead.
The possible ways to migrate the content were - manual, custom export / import script (the so populare ASPX page approach ;) or just write export to GatherContent and use the built-in GatherContent connector import functionality.
We thought we'll do this with the GatherContent module and it worked quite well.
The work we had to do on the GatherContent module (excluding the export) were somewhere around 2 or 3 hours.
Writing documentation for our clients (some ifs and buts here)
We have an internal Sitefinity (the so-called "intranet" or "corporate network",where we do our project management stuff. We also wanted to make sure that we have all projects documentation there for future reference (we hate the endless searching for internal documents, yuck!). So after we complete the search functionality "How do I create a new credit card for Bank X" will actually return that user documentation so each team member can play with the project internally.
On the other hand, documentation generation requires quite some of iterations.
Sitefinity is great for content editing (blogs, etc., etc.,) but in our opinion is not armed well for content collaboration. This is where GatherContent shines. Also - standardizing documentation will be a big pain in my opinion. Better stick with the idea of having text and basic HTML formatting and do the design stuff somewhere else (this is what basically a headless CMS does and GatherContnent is a headless CMS).
What I did was - created a new item and put some H1s for the sections I think are important and should be in the document.
Select the H1 with the mouse, right click, add comment, and off we are, each section have an inline, easy to track conversation.
After the document is imported to our internal Sitefinity instance - we use basic Kendo tricks to turn it to PDF at any time (html2pdf is a science, so we're using a small subset of features we're looking to expand as our demand increases).
The interesting part - Kendo drawing will not allow you to have images from another domain (cross origin), so we had to plug in to the GatherContent connector event hub api (we're doing some more improvements and will release documentation on it soon), download the image to our Sitefinity and replace the links (quick and dirty, working solution). The time for this custom work was around 2 hours (quick and dirty as I said).
The result currently is - since we have Projects classification, when someone should be working on a project - the only thing in order to see everything is to click the filter in our internal network and you get everything - documentation, some specific blog posts and so on. Maybe I should expand in another post on why not just use JIRA + Confluence for example.
Basic clone of the GatherContent connector documentation on our site
To be honest - this is not yet finished. I just created a page template, a mapping and a content block and synced the documentation from the GatherContent folks acount to our website.
There are some small glitches we'll be taking care of in the future.
You can see this "experiment on production" here:
GatherContent connector for Sitefinity documentation experiment
While we must admit we have a long way to go still, there are quite a few interesting use cases that the connector helped us with.
Transform Lists to dynamic content
A telecom client had about 500 content pieces that were stored in Lists (the built-in Lists module).
However, the issue was, that Lists have some limitations (consulting?).
So we quickly came to the conclusion we should switch to dynamic content instead.
The possible ways to migrate the content were - manual, custom export / import script (the so populare ASPX page approach ;) or just write export to GatherContent and use the built-in GatherContent connector import functionality.
We thought we'll do this with the GatherContent module and it worked quite well.
The work we had to do on the GatherContent module (excluding the export) were somewhere around 2 or 3 hours.
Writing documentation for our clients (some ifs and buts here)
We have an internal Sitefinity (the so-called "intranet" or "corporate network",where we do our project management stuff. We also wanted to make sure that we have all projects documentation there for future reference (we hate the endless searching for internal documents, yuck!). So after we complete the search functionality "How do I create a new credit card for Bank X" will actually return that user documentation so each team member can play with the project internally.
On the other hand, documentation generation requires quite some of iterations.
Sitefinity is great for content editing (blogs, etc., etc.,) but in our opinion is not armed well for content collaboration. This is where GatherContent shines. Also - standardizing documentation will be a big pain in my opinion. Better stick with the idea of having text and basic HTML formatting and do the design stuff somewhere else (this is what basically a headless CMS does and GatherContnent is a headless CMS).
What I did was - created a new item and put some H1s for the sections I think are important and should be in the document.
Select the H1 with the mouse, right click, add comment, and off we are, each section have an inline, easy to track conversation.
After the document is imported to our internal Sitefinity instance - we use basic Kendo tricks to turn it to PDF at any time (html2pdf is a science, so we're using a small subset of features we're looking to expand as our demand increases).
The interesting part - Kendo drawing will not allow you to have images from another domain (cross origin), so we had to plug in to the GatherContent connector event hub api (we're doing some more improvements and will release documentation on it soon), download the image to our Sitefinity and replace the links (quick and dirty, working solution). The time for this custom work was around 2 hours (quick and dirty as I said).
The result currently is - since we have Projects classification, when someone should be working on a project - the only thing in order to see everything is to click the filter in our internal network and you get everything - documentation, some specific blog posts and so on. Maybe I should expand in another post on why not just use JIRA + Confluence for example.
Basic clone of the GatherContent connector documentation on our site
To be honest - this is not yet finished. I just created a page template, a mapping and a content block and synced the documentation from the GatherContent folks acount to our website.
There are some small glitches we'll be taking care of in the future.
You can see this "experiment on production" here:
GatherContent connector for Sitefinity documentation experiment