About the Book
"This book is a must-have for all serious EPiServer developers, regardless of their level of experience."
-- Anders G. Nordby, EPiServer Most Valueable Professional
The book aims to provide a structured way for learning, and mastering, EPiServer 7 for developers. It starts with the basics, understanding what EPiServer CMS is and how it's intended to be used. The book then moves on to the core development concepts in EPiServer such as pages, blocks and renderers. Finally it builds on that foundation when covering advanced development topics such as extensibility and performance. All while mentioning best practices and useful tips from a long career in EPiServer development.
A work in progress
This book is a work in progress and will be continuously published. As a reader you'll be notified when a new version is out. This way we can hopefully all make sure that this book will be a great introduction to EPiServer development as well as a treasure trove of best practices for experienced and novice EPiServer developers alike.
Topics in the book
- Installing and using EPiServer CMS
- Development tools
- Core development concepts
- EPiServer site development 101 - creating page types, templates, rendering properties and building navigations
- Detailed look at settings and validation for content types and properties
- An in-depth look at how the CMS interacts with templates for On Page Editing and examples of custom property rendering
- Performance and scalability overview (Planned)
- Extensibility overview (Planned)
Who this book is for
The book starts with a detailed introduction to EPiServer CMS requiring no prior knowledge and then moves on to development, mixing tutorials with theory, in a fairly slow pace making it suitable for beginners with EPiServer CMS or those new to the current version. In future chapter the book will cover more advanced topics also making it suitable for experienced EPiServer developers. The book assumes basic knowledge of C# of ASP.NET but is written in such a way that it should be possible to follow it for developers without such knowledge. In order to follow the tutorials in the book the reader needs Visual Studio and SQL Server (the free Express editions of both works fine).
The tutorials and examples in the book are written using ASP.NET MVC but how to accomplish the same things in ASP.NET Web Forms will be covered briefly as well.
So, this book will be for everyone interested in EPiServer CMS development, but in its current state it's probably most valuable to those new to version 7 of EPiServer, or EPiServer development all together.
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Table of Contents
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About the book
- How to read this book
- Lean publishing, Leanpub and DRM
- Version status - version 7
- Version history
- Source code
- Questions and feedback
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About the book
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I Understanding EPiServer CMS
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1. From static site to CMS
- In the beginning there was HTML
- Componentization and server side processing
- Layouts
- Storing page content in a database
- A user interface for working with pages
- Creating an API
- Structuring pages in a hierarchy
- Template selection
- Page types
- Improving “edit mode”
- Versioning, multilingual content, files, work flows and god knows what
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2. Getting started with EPiServer
- System requirements
- Installation
- Licenses
- Creating a sample site
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3. Using EPiServer
- Logging in to Online Center
- Edit mode
- Admin mode
- There’s more
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1. From static site to CMS
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II Site development
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4. Core concepts
- PageData
- Page types and content types
- IContent
- ContentReference and PageReference
- Renderers/templates
- Data Access API
- Summary
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5. Tools
- Visual Studio integration
- NuGet
- Other useful tools
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6. Building an EPiServer site
- Creating a site project
- Defining a start page
- Layout and CSS
- Creating a page type with properties
- Creating a top menu
- Filtering content in listings and menus
- Building a sub navigation
- Adding a breadcrumb
- Adding the Quick Navigator
- Summary
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7. Page types
- What is a page type?
- The connection between page types and page type classes
- The ContentType attribute
- The Revert to Default functionality
- Localization
- The ImageUrl attribute
- Inheritance
- Available page types
- The Access attribute
- Summary
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8. Properties
- What is a property?
- The Display attribute
- Localization
- The UIHint attribute
- Property attributes
- Default values
- Property types
- More property types
- TinyMCE editor style sheets
- Validation
- IValidate
- Refactoring
- Summary
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9. Property rendering
- Our challenge
- How EPiServer identifies properties in templates
- The EditAttributes method
- Fixing live preview
- PropertyFor and custom wrapping elements
- PropertyFor, additional view data and EditContainerClass
- Default display templates and customized rendering of built in types
- Web Forms
- Example: images
- Example: enhancing XHTML strings
- Summary
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10. Content areas and partial renderers
- Content areas
- Partial renderers
- Styling items in content areas
- More on the default display template for content areas
- Template resolving with tags
- TemplateModel and TemplateDescriptorAttribute members
- Summary
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4. Core concepts
About the Author
Joel Abrahamsson is a former independent consultant working with EPiServer development as a developer, mentor and advisor. He's worked on a wide range of EPiServer projects ranging from small scale to some of the largest EPiServer implementations in the world. These days he's the CTO for the worlds largest EPiServer site.
Joel is an EPiServer Most Valued Professional (EMVP) and founder of the Page Type Builder project and several other popular open source extensions for EPiServer's products. He was also one of the co-founders of 200OK, a company that was aquired by EPiServer in 2012.
