by Dan Matthews
10. June 2008 12:13
At the EPiServer Partner Summit I was chatting over dinner to Andy Brodie of Networked Planet. He was remarking that it would be nice within EPiServer to have the capability to show site thumbnails when you hovered over hyperlinks. This intrigued me so when I got back to the UK I did some investigation. There are sites on the internet that do provide a service for this, such as websnapr, but ideally I wanted something that I had full control over.
Time to start coding :)
After some investigation on the web I found a great article about the WebBrowser control and ASP.NET. I tailored it to my needs and got a little thumbnail generator working. I also built a set of JavaScript functions that would show the thumbnails on hyperlinks using DHTML. Next I built a Control Adapter that would pick up EPiServer properties and parse them for hyperlinks. If it found hyperlinks it would insert references to my JavaScript functions. Lastly I wrapped all this in an assembly complete with my Single-Assembly VPP method and using dynamic web resource references.
And so HyperThumbnail was born. Go check it out on EPiCode or see the sample on B&D EPiLabs (hover over the hyperlinks in the content). Deploying to your own site couldn't be easier - simply drag-and-drop the DLL and a .browser file into your website folders.
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