Umbraco 7 Creating Reusable Data (not layout of such)

0
votes

I'm new to Umbraco (using latest version, which at this time is 7.4.3) and really don't have any experience with CMSs at all, for that matter. I'm needing to give content editors a way to create many "Reports" which consist of meta data about each (Date, Title, associated downloads) and then "Sections" of the "Report", which is basically a table of contents with associated content.

  • Reports

    • Report1

      • Title

      • Date

      • IsArchived

      • Sections

        • Section1

          • Title

          • Content

        • Section2
          • Title
          • Content

    • Report2 ...

Each "Report" could take quite a bit of time to set up and each one's data will be reused on various web pages and in different display formats (such as list of reports vs. full report detail).

Using Umbraco, what is the best approach for this? I'd like the content editors to be able to define the report data once and then pick that data to be displayed on various pages and in different ways.

I've seen posts about using Archetype to create reusable "pickable widgets" (http://24days.in/umbraco/2015/umbraco-zeitgeist/#picked-widgets), but that seems kind of hacky and unintuitive for the editor users. Then I've seen mention of creating whole new custom sections of the BackOffice, which seems like overkill and possibly a hell of a lot of work and ramp up time to learn how to do so.

Ideas?? TIA!

1
umbracoumbraco7

1 Answers

0
votes

Your requirement seems like the data you want to provide is dynamic (in other words, going through different documents and collect data). If you use the datatype way of persisting the report data, it should be manually edited and data might become stale..

If this report needs to be pulled at run time, it may be wise to pull the data from Umbraco at run-time and may be cache it for a while so that request for the subsequent report requests are faster..