Tools for improving efficiency as a Sitecore Content Author

Working as a Content Author in Sitecore on a content-heavy site can be quite a time-consuming task. With this article, I would like to focus on a few tools in Sitecore that can help the content authors work with better efficiency.

These powerful tools are much underutilized, I feel.

 

MY TOOLBAR

While working on a page, we move between a lot of tabs to attain certain tasks one after the other.

For eg. To access save button, we go to Home tab. To submit the page in workflow, we go to Review tab. To publish the page we go to Publish tab. We can minimize this moving between the tabs by customizing a tab called MY TOOLBAR.

To attain this, Go to My toolbar tab and hit customize. Add from list the action buttons that you use most frequently.

My toolbar 1

I chose the items as shown above. So now MY TOOLBAR shows this for me.

My toolbar 2

 

BOOKMARK

If there is a page that we are required to land up on often as a content author, we can bookmark it by adding it in our favorites list. To do this, go to the page in the content tree, Choose tab Navigate > Favorites > Add to Favorites

bookmark1

Once the item is added to Favorites, it will start appearing in the list as shown below.

bookmark2

We can also organize the items added to Favorites. For example, we can change order, rename or delete the items. Please note, renaming the item will only rename it the way it sits in favorites and not the item name in the content tree.

bookmark3.png

 

ON PAGE FIELD NAVIGATOR

If a page has numerous field section titles and fields it can be a tedious task to reach the field we would want to.

on page field navigator 1.PNG

This button at the top right corner under the ribbon, helps you to navigate to the required field or the field section titles directly without searching for the field (or field section title). Click on the down arrow and the dropdown of the list of field sections and fields appears. Select the field you want to go to. Simple! Isn’t it?

on page field navigator 2

I hope you find these tools as much time-saving as they are for me.