Adding How-to Videos and Guidelines for content editors in Umbraco

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Emmanuel Tissera
·

2 min read

Adding How-to Videos and Guidelines for content editors in Umbraco

While doing some work for a Charity in Australia, the client made a request to have some how-to videos displayed within the CMS.
The client had some advanced editors who were willing to record the videos and write down the guidelines.
Now they needed a way it could be displayed on the Umbraco back-office and updated by those advanced editors in the future.

This is the solution I came up with.

  • Create a Google Slides presentation with the guidelines and how-to videos. This Google Slides presentation can be later edited by anyone who has access to it.
    (PS: I tried Google Docs, but it didn't support video embedding)
  • Use File » Publish to the web » Embed option and copy the Embed code from there.

For a tab on the dashboard of the content section

  1. Create a new "Editor Help" tab within the Content Area using the instructions from here: https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/extending/dashboards/
  2. Here's my code sample for adding into ~/config/Dashboard.config: 
    <section alias="StartupHelpSection">
<areas>
    <area>content</area>
    <area>default</area>
</areas>
<tab caption="Editor Help">
    <control>
        ~/App_Plugins/Spire.Custom/views/helpdashboardintro.html
    </control>
</tab>
</section>

  3. Create a view with the Embed code in it.
    Code sample: 

    <div class="umb-dashboard-grid">
<div style="max-width: 1200px">
    <h3><strong>How-to videos & Guidelines</strong></h3>
    <p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 30px; max-width: 760px;">
        <span>Here's some information to get you started.</span>
    </p>

    <div class="row">
        <iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13hdjSb-LNJBwcSqXY-NUZgKgexS4ZcfHsu6F9Gguqcs/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000" frameborder="0" width="960" height="569" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>
    </div>
</div> 
</div>

For a tab on given document types:

  1. Install the "Inline Html Help Label" (ProWorksInlineHtmlHelpLabel) package from here: https://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/inline-html-help-label
  2. Add another tab to the document type and name it as "Editor Help"
  3. Add a property named Help with an "HTML Inline Help Label" editors
  4. In the HTML to display, add some HTML with the Embed code in it:
    See my code snippet below: 
    <h3><strong>How-to videos & Guidelines</strong></h3>
<p><span>Here's some information to get you started.</span></p>
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1R-PTnDRf0mzsSbAyQVbkDrYRP9cjmW4Z6nhxe3Grl2I/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000" frameborder="0" width="960" height="569" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

That's all there is for the setup from a developer's perspective. Now an editor who has access to the Google Slides presentation could update it anytime and it will appear within the CMS back-office with no further intervention from the developer.

See a walkthrough video of how it was all put together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRyKylWIVI

This concept could be used with other CMS back-offices as well. Give it a try and leave me a comment.

This article was originally written on Google's Blogger platform and ported to Hashnode on 17 Sep 2022.

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