Bundles and experience manager

Question

I am currently working on creating workflow and have come up against a small road block and wanted to check if what I am trying to achieve is technically possible or if I am barking up the wrong tree. This isn't really a workflow issue though so haven't tagged it.

Basically we want our users to be able to use experience manager to create page and components. We use experience manager at our lowest publication level and use the in-line editing settings to create the creating the pages and components at the required publication levels and this is working nicely. The basic structure we have is components created in a high level publication, pages created at a mid publication and then language variants of the publications at the lowest (language sites essentially).

I have managed to get the page and component added to a bundle automatically on save at the publication level the pages are created at (mid level). The issue that I am having is that this bundle then isn't visible to users in the bottom publication level using experience manager and so they can't edit the metadata that I have added to allow selection of publish scheduling date and also which sites to publish to. It also means that they can't start the workflow from experience manager. (The reason that the bundle needs to be created at the mid-level is that we may want to publish the bundle to all websites and as such it needs to be available at all levels)

So basically is what I am trying to achieve possible or do I need to create an experience manager site at the same publication level as the pages for this to work?

Any help/advice would be gratefully received!

Answer 1

The bundle is available in the child publication as it blueprints normally; you just cannot add items to it in that publication. Bundles can only contain items that are from the same publication as where the bundle is created or any parent publication.

What I find more interesting in your scenario is how you differentiate between creating local and global content in Experience Manager; when you have multiple "country" sites at the bottom where you publish from with a generic master publication for pages and components how does a user create new content at the bottom level if you configure your page and component publication as the "master" ones?

If your only problem is that you want to get data from the bundles you could write a GUI extension for Experience Manager to work with it (as I said the bundles are accessible there; you can see and open them from the Tridion CM GUI).

Answer 2

Have had a response from SDL basically in experience manager you can only view bundles that you can edit in experience manager (makes sense when you think about it really) so seeing as a bundle created at a higher publication cannot be edited (unless you decide to localize it) you will not see it in the bundles section of experience manager. The downside to this is that you cannot start workflow on a bundle from a higher publication, but probably a small price to pay for not having users confused by seeing items that then cannot edit.

Hope this helps to save someone else some time.