Detecting duplicate pages in the broker database

It should never happen, but somehow it occasionally does: duplicate records in your broker database. For example: if you have a deployer for staging and another one for live, but you accidentally point them to the same broker database. When this happens, you might end up with 2 (or more) pages in the broker, with the same publication ID and the same URL.

Do you want to know if this is the case for you? Read on.

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Copying content from MS Office to Tridion

It is a common practice of almost everybody who works with Tridion: copying text from Word or Excel into a rich text field in Tridion. Unfortunately, when you do this you end up copying much more than just the text. Styling characteristics also find their way into the rich text field, in the form a style attributes, class attributes, comments, unnecessary spans, and even complete sets of CSS classes. And when a component with such a rich text field is published, all this styling finds its way to your site, where it is very likely to clash with your carefully designed pages.

Of course, you can circumnavigate this issue by copying first to a text editor like Notepad, copy it again and then pasting it into Tridion. But there is a more elegant solution for this problem. It requires just a tiny bit of work.

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Reverse link propagation

When you publish an item in Tridion, all items linking to this item are also published, on 2 conditions:

– The linking item is already published
– The checkbox ‘If other published Components link to a Component you are publishing, publish or republish those Components’ is checked (this is the default)

I don’t know if this principle has an official name, but I call it ‘reverse link propagation’, because it follows links backwards and propagates the publishing action to the linking items.

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Dyndle is released

A few months ago, I wrote about Dyndle. Today I have good news for anyone who needs to build an ASP.NET web application based on SDL Tridion Sites: Dyndle has been released.

Dyndle is free of charge and fully ready for you to use.
Besides the framework itself, we have also launched a new web site. On dyndle.com, you can find everything you need to know, including extensive documentation.
Tridion developers: enjoy your new toy.