Content Item Feature Request

Hi,

I'd like to suggest a feature for all content items that have a SingleItemView and ListView i.e. News / Blogs etc.

At the moment you have a listing of news articles. When you click on one of those news articles it shows just the selected news article, but uses the same .aspx page. i.e. the template doesnt change at all. On my news home page I would like to show the list of news, plus some other widgets in a sidebar I have. However, when I click on a news article I would like to display a completely different set of widgets in the side bar.

This would allow us to display much more relevant information once a user has gone as far as to read an article, for example you might display related stories as a widget, or you might display a widget that shows tweets related to this article. These are just examples, but the point is it will give the content editors full control over the content rather than them just having a list of news, and a news article.

The same applies for almost any module that has a list/single view i.e. products / blogs / events / jobs.

I have acheived this in the past by creating a seperate CMS page, and then creating a rewrite rule that looks for /news/some-news-article.aspx but this is a pain because you then have to hard code rewrite rules into the web.config which prevents the end-user being able to change the main news page url etc. You could achieve the same result without creating a rewrite rule, but then you ended up with a nasty url that included the page you were displaying the single news article on, for example:

/news/news-article/my-news-article1.aspx, whereas what we really want it /news/my-news-article1.aspx (~you may want the date or category to appear in the url of course).

It appears that the same has been done in V4, i.e. the news target page is included in the URL.

I envisage two ways of acheiving this:
1) Allow the url for news target page i.e. the selected page to show the article to be created without the target page forming part of the url i.e. news/my-news-article.aspx not news/<targetpage>/my-news-article.aspx
2) Or, allow for both view i.e. single and list, to be designed on the same page and allow widgets to be dragged onto those views.

I really think this will be a huge benefit for content editors, for search engines, and for us the developers who have put a lot of thought into the url structure of our site.

Afterall, you dont find many successful sites out there that reference:

/products/<productpage>/hp-compaq-laptop.aspx

or

/news/<newsarticlepage>/uk-politics-in-turmoil.aspx

If you do, I'll eat my words!

Hope you consider it.

Al

Hello Higgsy,

Thank you for your request. 

We partially have this - every widget that has single and details mode, has the option to show the single item in a separate page. Please check the attached sreenshot.

One thing that we are missing - you cannot specify separate page for a separate news article. We will think about this though.

Let me know if I am missing something.

Hi Georgi,

I have had some more time to think about this. I dont think creating two views on the same page i.e. Single and Detailed views would be very user friendly.

The main point I was trying to raise was that when you select an alternative page for the detailed page, the url of that page appears in the URL, please see example:

My list view is on /news/
My single view is on /news/article/

The url for a news item would be: /news/article/<my-news-article>

This is creating an unnecessarry additiona to the url i.e. /article/.

From an SEO point of view, if a robot were to check the content of /news/article/ the content would be exactly the same as /news/ which would be deemed as content duplication.

So essentially I am saying, I like my single and list views to look different i.e. there are different widgets on the page. To acheive this I select a different page from the page list. Fine. However, the option to NOT include the page I have selected in the URL would be extremely useful, so that we have complete control over the url structure of our site i.e.

/news/<my-news-article>

I hope that makes more sense.

Regards,
higgsy

Hi Higgsy,

I got it. I'll check if we can change this easily, I suspect that this is part of our routing engine.
Thanks!