Sitecore how to manage duplicate content

1
votes

I'm currently developing a website in Sitecore where there will be three distinct areas which have the same structure down to level 2 pages, beyond this level structure is likely to diverge. Some of these pages will have identical content across each structure, whereas some will be unique. The content is something like this:

home\section-1-home\sub-page-1  (identical content between the three sections)
                   \sub-page-2  (identical content between the three sections)
                   \sub-page-3  (different content for each section)
    \section-2-home\sub-page-1
                   \sub-page-2
                   \sub-page-3
    \section-3-home\sub-page-1
                   \sub-page-2
                   \sub-page-3
                   \sub-page-4  (extra page, unique to this section)

Is there a way to manage this scenario in Sitecore?

I've had two ideas how to manage this so far:

1) Set up some kind of custom publishing action which merges content from a nominated 'master' version of a page, to the slave versions of the same page.

2) Create a master content tree (at the same level as home and thus not directly browsable), then do something clever to the Sitecore Context object to make it point to an item in this master content tree instead of the current item.

Edit: Just to clarify; I'm using Sitecore 6.2 for this site and at the moment, changing to another version of Sitecore isn't an option :-(

4
asp.netsitecoresitecore6
SC 6.2 is not a problem, it still leaves you a number of options (actually, all except for item clones). Both James' and my answers give a link to "Reusing and Sharing content" document which can help you here... – Yan Sklyarenko
Thanks for that. That document had some useful advice. I'm now going down the route of having a field in any shared content items which points to a common master item which is then used as the source of any of that page's content. – Matthew Dresser

4 Answers

4
votes

If you're working with Sitecore 6.4 then you may want to look at item cloning. You can clone a single item or even an entire branch of the content tree. A clone will get its data from its parent, though individual fields of the item can be overwritten.

Considerations for Sitecore 6.4 architecture for multiple site, multiple language open ended solution?

http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2010/10/Sitecore-CMS-6-4-Cloning.aspx

If you're staying with an earlier version then you should read this: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/sc62keywords/reusing_and_sharing_data_sc62_a4001.pdf

They'll update that document to include cloning sometime...

1
votes

If I understood your problem correctly, then there are various ways you can do this, i will only mention a couple

  1. Create a custom 'shared content' section in your tree and then with in each section create a 'shared content sublayout/renderer' and set the source of the sublyout to the shared content

  2. Other option could be to consider on section as the master section and then hook into either save or publishing piplines and create/clone your items.

0
votes

You could also you proxies, which work with a lot of version of Sitecore (5.3 to at least 6), which let you create "copies" of items.

You need to enable them in the web.config though and there are some draw backs.

For Sitecore 6 see:

http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/64/reusing_and_sharing_data-a4.pdf#search=%22proxies%22

Or do a search on proxies on the SDN.