layoutnotfound

Layout not found, never a good look. Despite all efforts to not link to items lacking presentation the only sure-fire way to prevent this is to simply not have any; everything under the home node should have *some* kind of presentation applied. In every case where someone has said “don’t worry, there is no way they could reach that item” they always have linked to it or found that users actively change the urls to it (happens more than you’d expect).

The biggest offender for zero presentation is the common garden variety /sitecore/templates/Common/Folder. It’s not uncommon to see deeply nested sets of folders in order to create more content rich urls, it is after all part of the SEO holy trinity of url, title and header. My replacement for this is what I call the bump folder, not the best of names but it has stuck. It’s straightforward to implement and dead easy for content editors to use, the bump folder simply 301 redirects the user to either the parent item or the item selected in a droplink.

First step is to create a new template in your solution and add the following field:

bumpfoldertemplate

This is a single droplink field called Target and I’ve ticked shared as it’s language invariant (or at least likely to be, just untick if it’s going to change based on language). The interesting bit to note here is the source, you can not only supply paths but also sitecore queries. In this case the query used is “query:./*[@@tid!=../@@tid]” which means “Select all child items which are not bump folders”. The reason I avoid linking up to bump folders is to avoid 301 daisy chaining or even worse 301 loops (where the folder linked to has no target set and 301 redirects to the parent item). I’m also using a drop list instead of a general link so as to avoid the folders turning into aliases and creating the website equivalent of spaghetti code.

The only thing to add now is a layout item (and aspx file) and assign it to the presentation for the bump folder. In the codebehind for the layout add the following:


protected void Page_PreInit(object sender, EventArgs e) { 
  LookupField target = Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["target"]; 
  if(target.TargetItem != null) 
    Response.Redirect(target.TargetItem.GetFriendlyUrl()); 
  Response.Redirect(Sitecore.Context.Item.Parent.GetFriendlyUrl());
}

Done, I know it’s not exactly ground breaking stuff but it’s little things like this that can really make a big difference to a Sitecore project.

Update: 27th September 2009

Doh, forgot to add that I’m using a set of extension methods alongside my solution, GetFriendlyUrl() in this case is actually an extension method.

public static string GetFriendlyUrl(this Item item)
{
    return LinkManager.GetItemUrl(item);
}

Also as pointed out by Thomas Eldblom these bump folders shouldn’t preclude the development of “fit for purpose” container items. They’re simply for content editors to organise their content into more useful hierarchies. Thomas also has some good pointers on how to manage your errors in general, see the comments for more details.