Hello Sitecore Enthusiasts,
Hope you are enjoying the posts on Sitecore Endeavor blog?
Today’s post is about helping the Content Authors on our Client Side and making their jobs easy.
Generally, we developers do the Templating stuff and categorize various fields into different sections. And we know, that sometimes while creating fields, we give them names short enough so that its easy for us to take care in code as well as readable and understandable. But lets think about it from the end user’s perspective. If the client or the client user, is not enough technical, he/she won’t understand what does that field mean, what values should it have and things like that. He/She will have a number of questions. Yes, definitely, if he/she is smart enough, they would go to some items that we developers have created, to check out what values we have assigned and why. Also, he might contact us — Yes, we would definitely love to help him out, but why put him in this situation.
Sitecore as we already know, has designed a great and robust architecture and takes care of this thing also very easily. (Yet another point added to my list of Why I Love Sitecore) Right at the time of defining the template and its fields, we can move to individual fields and assign appropriate Help text and Tool-tip to make things easy.
Lets look at how we can do this:
- Create a new Template in the Sitecore Content Tree and categorize a number of fields in various logical sections. For simplicity, I have considered the Template that we had talked about in the previous Post (Track PDF Downloads in Google Analytics)
- Now, we can see here, that Google Analytics Code – is a pretty simple field and the name explains it. But that’s not true for the other two – Google Analytics Track PDF Downloads & Google Analytics PDF Category. Sure, as a developer we might understand that, but quite possible the nontechnical user authoring the content might not. So lets make his work a little easy. Go to the Item which is the Field – Google Analytics Track PDF Downloads – in the Content Tree.
- Next, go to the View Tab in the above ribbon and select Standard Fields – because that’s when we can see the Standard Sections & Fields defined by Sitecore in the item.
- Next, go to the Help section of the item. As the name suggests, its to help understand what this item (here, field of the Template) is about. Lets enter some help text in the Short as well as Long Description fields.
- Now, lets go to the corresponding Template’s Item (i.e. Setting-Template’s Item) in the Content Tree and see how that help text looks like.
[Update: 9th Oct, 2014 – 11:10 AM]
There is one more way of doing this, thanks to Brijesh Patel for sharing that.
- Same as above
- Same as above
- Next, go to Configure Tab and Select the Help as shown below
- A Dialog box appears on the screen, where we can add the same two fields as shown below.
- Same as above.
This second way shown by Brijesh Patel, is indeed useful and again shows how Cool is Sitecore!
Thanks Brijesh, and Thanks Sitecore!
[/Update]
Hope this was helpful!
Happy Sitecoring! 🙂
