EPiServer is an Interesting technology we’ve started working on recently. I will try to blog my impressions and the progress over the course of learning the solution.

Since I just seem unable to learn by reading docs I chose to build an email obfuscating (antispam) control and a paged search as an exercise and a way to learn the guts of the EPiServer.

A couple of loose thoughts for a start…

Translation

I am not sure I fully appreciate the way the translation is performed for the parts of the system that is editor independent . The translation is done by means of xml files stored on the disk in the /lang folder.

Basically what that means is that it’s much more prone to missing translations and thus is not as translation friendly as it could fairly easily be.

For the content I can always fall back to the e.g. english version and look what’s the original value there. not so much for the framework translations. Is there a tool for that? I will investigate that later as we’ll probably want to create a number of controls for the website we’ll be working on soon, and that will need to be translated to many languages. And not just that but also the original template files – we will need much more than what’s available originally in EPiServer.

So once you define your control’s content:

<asp:LinkButton ID=”Obfuscate” runat=”server” CausesValidation=”False” OnClick=”ObfuscateEmail”>

    <episerver:translate Text=”/templates/emailobfuscator/obfuscate“ runat=”server” ID=”Translate3″ />

</asp:LinkButton>

in which you defined where the translation is to come from. (In this case the path is: “/templates/emailobfuscator/obfuscate”) you need to edito the template framework file and add the translation there with the XPath defined in the control. Which looks along the lines of:

<?xml version=“1.0“ encoding=“utf-8“ standalone=“yes“?>

<languages>

    <language name=“English“ id=“EN“>

        <templates>

            <emailobfuscator>

                <obfuscate>Obfuscate</obfuscate>

            </emailobfuscator>

            …

        </templates>

        …

    </language>

</languages>

The most annoying part of it though is that it needs to be done for alll the languages if you want the site to be fully translated, which without a tool is not fun.

I will look more into that later. One would expect that a tool like that may exist already.

Technology

I am really looking forward to EPiServer 5.x to be released. It’s to be based on ASP.NET 2.0 which most probably means (I hope)that a number of EPiServer specific technologies will be replaced by a .Net generic technologies. As the ElektroPost notices:

EPiServer Content Framework Is Not Unlike ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages and Content Pages.

Also the EPiServer seems to be really hard to develop for in VS.Net 2005. I still didn’t Indeed ElektroPost suggests VS 2003 as the development platform, but once switched to 2005 I personally can’t deal with VS 2003 any longer.

The good news though is that it is compatible with .Net 2.0 in a way that you can simply add an ASP 2.0 control and with just slight modifications work with it. You can also use .Net 2.0 partial classes – which means much cleaner code.

Overall the EPiServer is a really positive experience. I’m looking forward to work more with it.

The article is based on the knowledge I’ve gathered and work I’ve performed for Cognifide. Cognifide is an official partner EPiServer and the real contributor of the the control.