Umbraco 7 lists

Question

I am new to Umbraco, and am trying to get to grips with its concepts, in particular how to create lists. For example, you might want a news listing that appears on a page as a list of headlines with mouseover extra content, but you don't want to be able to click on an item and open a full page, it's just there as a list.

You could create a repeating grid of content on the page itself, but that could become unwieldy.

It looks like (correct me if I am wrong) the Umbraco way is to create a parent page, and each news item to be a child page, which can be edited individually, and use a partial view to list them on the required page.

Is this the recommended approach? If so, two questions :

1. How do I exclude these news 'phantom' pages from the main navigation - I understand I could set a true/false property on the page with alias umbracoNaviHide and tick this (which excludes it from 'visible' in the queries)
2. If so, how do I prevent direct access to the news page by its url (the umbracoNaviHide does not prevent the page opening)

Presumably these news pages would show in the back end main view as they would be descendants of the home page?

Any advice welcome!

Answer 1

You can use a Content Repository to hold content objects that won't be pages in your application.

Use following steps:

Step 1: Create the root content repository document type

Go to your backend to the Settings section. Under Document Types create a new type and give it the name Content Elements. After creating this make sure to check the checkbox of Allow at root in order to add this element to your root in the Content section.

Step 2: Add your newly created document type to the root of the content

Go to the Content section and choose to add a new item directly under content ( select the three dots next to Content ).

Select your Content Elements item, give it a name and click save.

Step 3: Remove the checkbox allow at root

You only want to add one Content Reposity item to your root where you will place all items like news, jobs, locations,...

Go to the settings of the Content Elements document type and remove the checkbox of Allow at root.

Step 4: Create a child repository for each type

Using your example I will now create a News document type which will be a child item of the Content Elements repository.

Go to the Document Types under Setting in your backend and choose to add a new document type. Give it a name News and choose save.

In the settings of the Content Elements check the checkbox of the newly created News item to allow as a child.

Step 5: Add the news list in your content

In the content section choose to add a new item under the Content Elements using the three dots.

Select the News item, give it a name and choose save.

Step 6: Create a new document for the news item

One more item is a NewsItem which will hold the properties/information of the item.

Using the same steps of 4 you can easly add this. Be aware that now you have to go to the News item where you will add a check to the NewsItem checkbox to allow as a child.

Also now define some properties of the newsitem.

Step 7: Add newsitems in the content

Using the same steps from 5 you can now add items in the news list.

Step 8: How to place a content element on to your page

If you have created a page you can add a property with a ContentPicker datatype which can be used to select a item from the Content Elements repository. Or using partial views you can create a list from the News to get all items.

Hope this helps!