Content management customizations

Content management in terms of the Admin App backend UI encapsulates how you handle content items in Sitefinity CMS backend. That is, how you view, select, and decide what to do with items from the list with specific types of content, say, News, Blogs or Dynamic module.

Having a well-sorted and structured content list is of key importance for finding the item you require. However, you may need an extra touch – be it for additional information or context of the items in the list. The Custom grid sample provides you with means to add an extra column to the content list, say, related data or data from external systems. In this specific example, the column provides a thumbnail picture from a predefined list with images for each content item in the list. Let’s go back the news example – the images may be related to the news area, say, economics, or the specific title, or to keywords the piece is tagged with.

For more information about the custom grid extension, see the corresponding GitHub repo.

Next steps

To expand on the example above, you can enrich the content list with even more context. For example, along with the news image, the custom column implementation can retrieve and display related data for the author name and image.

By default, the Actions menu lists the most common activities, related to operating with the content item - such as edit, publish, and so on. However, your team may need a specific activity at quickly accessible in the Actions menu, say, print or pin an important blog post at the top of the list. The Custom commands menu sample enables you to do just that. Learn more about the Custom commands menu in GitHub.

Apart from this simple case, you can go on and implement a more complex activity, related to content, as well as choose to perform the action on a single or multiple content items (bulk actions).

Following are a couple of examples to get your inspiration going:

• Check whether the content abides to branding guidelines, including product names, logos, color codes, and so on.
• Validate that content or images are profanity-free