Dynamic Placeholders and IExpandable

There have been quite a few posts on the topic of ‘Dynamic Placeholders’ (among the most useful of which are those of John Newcombe, Nick Wesselman and Dave Leigh).  If you haven’t come across this topic, then I’d suggest checking out Nick Wesselman’s blog post for a pretty succinct explanation of it.  It boils down to the limitation that you cannot place multiple sublayouts containing a placeholder onto a page in such a way that the placeholders resolve to having the same fully qualified placeholder keys.  I really like John Newcombe’s approach, which is based on Nick Wesselman’s; and having spent quite a bit of time playing with it, I’d certainly suggest that anyone needing to solve this problem takes a look themselves.

I plan to tackle a slightly different problem in this post: that of dynamically creating a number of placeholders within a single sublayout (so dynamic placeholders instead of dynamic placeholder keys, although as we’ll see later, the two problems can be solved in a very similar manner). Continue reading Dynamic Placeholders and IExpandable

NVelocity: Sitecore’s original template engine

I sometimes wonder how many people look at the various dependencies that come with Sitecore.  One has to be slightly careful around how these are licensed, especially with Telerik, but I think that there’s one which deserves a mention: NVelocity.  NVelocity was originally a .Net port of the Java-based Velocity templating engine.  Sadly the project itself is more-or-less dead as far as I can tell; having been overtaken by more modern engines like Razor, but I still use it now and then. I thought that I’d explain the basics for people who hadn’t heard of it until now. Continue reading NVelocity: Sitecore’s original template engine