I have an Umbraco site
...with various document types, e.g.:
- page
- publication
- event
- news
...and various templates, e.g.:
- home
- content
- content with listing
- content with embedded media (e.g. a youtube video)
Within a template I have some optional macros / widgets. For example, sometimes a page with the "content" template will display a "search site" widget, and sometimes it wont. Whether or not a particular widget is displayed on a particular page will be controlled by the CMS admin (who isn't a developer).
Adding a template for each combination of widgets isn't an option: if the "content" template has optional widgets W1, W2, W3 then I'll end up needing to create a template for each member of the powerset of those widgets - i.e. I'll have to multiply the number of templates I have by 8 (2^n) for just 3 optional widgets (there'll be more than 3 optional widgets for the real site).
So I'd like to toggle the display of widgets on and off, based on a parameter set by the user in the Umbraco backend somewhere. The actual toggling on and off is very easy - I'll just add an "if (widgetX_is_turned_on)" statement in my user control.
But, as far as I can tell, I can only add properties to document types, not to templates. I'd prefer not to add a property for toggling every widget into my root document type, because many of those toggles / properties will end up doing nothing if the template associated with a document doesn't allow a certain widget. For example if I create a "page" document called "Example Page" with a "content" document type, then the "display search site widget" toggle / property will do nothing if the "content" template doesn't actually allow the display of the "search site" widget.
Is there a neat and tidy way to parameterize a template so that I can switch macros / widgets on and off for individual documents?
