Best practice for local data source content with bucketed items

Question

We are developing a multi-tenant website using Sitecore 9. For the news articles we decided to bucket them therefore making the content editors unable to go check the children (local content) of a page when added inside the placeholders. For example:

-Home
--News
----2019
------01
--------12
----------News Example 1
------------Slider 1
------------Header 1
----------News Example 2
------------Slider 2
------------Header 2

As far as I know, the content editor can edit the local content of a news page by:

1. Searching the item in the parent folder
2. In the Experience Editor, click on edit related content

For option 1. It can be extremely hard to find the exact item an editor is looking for, so this seems not optimal. For option 2. I noticed that some buttons are disabled when using it, such as removing items from a multilist selection, or pressing close (not sure if this is a bug?). Also if there are no standard values, it might be hard to click on the component.

What would be the best practices for this and are there any other methods available?

Answer 1

We usually instruct users to enable viewing Bucket items(-trees) in the Content editor. This can be achieved as follows:

• In the "View"-tab in an open Content editor browser, enable the checkbox "Buckets"

• In the "Control Panel" under "Application options", enable the checkbox "Bucket items"

Otherwise I would refer to @mark-gibbons recommendation with using the "Search"-tab, but you might want to customize the view for the Bucket search results of the News to be more appealing and understandable to the Content Managers. Here's an example how to achieve something like that: https://sitecore.namics.com/2018/06/15/sitecore-9-custom-bucket-views/

Answer 2

The easiest way to find items in a bucket is by using the Content Editor as follows:

• Make sure your sitecore_master_index is up to date as it is where the bucketable items will be read from.
• Click on your bucket folder. You should be on a "Search" tab.
• Click the search icon. This should now load all items in the bucket.
• You can filter by item name as well as any other field on the item.
• To edit the item, simply click on one of the results. This will take you to the item which you can then edit in either the Content Editor or the Experience Editor.

Sitecore also has a great feature for saving frequently used filters. Please see here for documentation on this as well as some more info on what I've described above.

Answer 3

I made some custom link fields that work seamlessly with buckets. Aside from a rich search UI it also allows a content editor to open up the linked item easily so they don't have to search for the item: https://github.com/Barsonax/SitecoreSearchFields