How to create a new Custom Renderer in Tridion 2011

Reading a very good post about Custom Renderers written by Jaime Santos, I thought of sharing with you a document I wrote at the beginning of the year about the same topic.

In case you need some background information about what a Custom Renderer is, I strongly recommend you reading Jaime's post where he explains this very clearly. 

The prerequsites to follow this post are as follows:

• SDL Tridion 2011 installed, with Content Manager and Content Delivery working
• Tomcat and Java installed on your development environment
• OData working

Sharing from TechLink

TechLink is an internal E-Mail distribution list in Tridion, where mostly technical questions and problems are discussed. 

One of my main motivations to create this blog, was the fact that in TechLink seems to be a lot of information that is worth to share with the rest of the Tridion Community. 

I have actually already collected quite a lot of information from TechLink, but so far I just added a couple of code snippets to this blog. 

Identifying Environments, Targets and Websites

I think that there are two things that should always be done while working with any Tridion environemnt, specially when it has DTAP (Development, Test, Acceptance and Production infrastructure).

1. Create descriptive host names instead of using IPs, for any target websites as well as for the different CMEs (Content Manager Explorers). 

Given the following facts

• Company having two large divisions in which an independent website is needed, marketing and support.
• Each website has two targets, staging and live.
• The infraestructure has developments and production.

Custom Http Error Module in C#

(this post is displayed correctly in Chrome and IE but not in Firefox)

During the implementation of a very large website I had to find a way to redirect http errors to custom error pages, the technologies used on the front end were Windows 2008 Server, IIS 7 and ASP .Net (C#). After doing some research I shortly found a few different approaches to handle http errors, below are details of all these approaches and limitations of some of them.

Creating a Component using TOM .NET API

This is an example of how to create a component even when it has a schema that has custom Metadata

Creating a schema using Core Service

This is an example about how to create a schema using the Core Service... 

A new blogger has born

For a while I have been thinking about how I could contribute to the Tridion community, and at last I found the answer, and you are looking at it right now ;o)


My motivation to create my own blog has been to do things "my way", what I mean by that is that I have seen plenty of sites in which you can usually do either: read posts from one person or contribute to a code repository. This is not just good, this is really good, fantastic, amazing! But, I will try to do something that I haven't found yet... wondering what it is? Just getting there.