Sitecore - What are the pitfalls of storing content in the renderings field

Question

I'd like to know if anyone has had experience of using rendering parameter fields in Sitecore to store content. If so, what drawbacks are there?

In some respects, this seems like an attractive idea as you can add a sublayout to a page numerous times without needing to create child items and setting each sublayout's datasource to one of these child items.... however putting content into renderings fields has a few disadvantages:

1. This solution is not localizable since the renderings field is shared, so no good for multi-language sites.

2. To edit the content (if using the content editor) you need to switch to the presentation tab, click details, select the sublayout then edit the rendering parameters which is all a bit cumbersome.

Are there any more serious consequences of adopting this approach?

Answer 1

1. There is no way to apply workflow to the fields.
2. There is no way to enable the fields for the page editor.
3. You can accomplish this just as easily by using the Page Editor and setting a Datasource Template and Datasource Location on your sublayout.
4. I'll reiterate something you already pointed out -- it's a shared field, so the content can't be localized.
5. There's no way to reuse the content stored in parameter fields.
6. Even if you DID do it, its hard to get the data from the parameters because they are XML-based (hint: add an Image to rendering parameters and look at what value you get back)

Overall, you are breaking the separation of content and presentation that the layout field is intended to provide. Please don't do this, one day a developer following in your footsteps will come across it and then spend all day on http://nooooooooooooooo.com/.