Alloy demonstration templates
Describes the Alloy sample site which you can install for demonstration and testing purposes.
Alloy is a Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) demonstration template package that contains a site for a fictional company "Alloy Technologies", and to demonstrate the most important features of CMS and give you a site that is ready to explore or to start with.
The Alloy templates are built on the latest CMS platform. If you are new to CMS, you should start by install a sample site and explore it in detail. It will give you a great introduction to the user interface, as well as project structure and programming patterns.
Tech summary
- Based on the latest releases
- Built on ASP.NET MVC 5
- Based on the responsive Bootstrap by Twitter HTML framework
The templates are distributed as a dotnet template. See install a sample site.
Design philosophy
Template development with ASP.NET MVC is supported since version 7. The Alloy templates are created as an example of how to build a CMS site with good characteristics, both in terms of maintainability and performance. They also show an example of how conventions in MVC can be tuned to suit a website like Alloy.
The Alloy templates were initially built after discussions with developers working with ongoing CMS and MVC development projects. These discussions, prototyping, and the unique characteristics of the Alloy site were distilled into a number of design decisions geared towards making it easy to extend the Alloy site with new content types and functionality. Since then, the templates have been continually updated and extended.
Alloy is using MVC (Model-View-Controller) but CMS supports Razor Pages and templates built in client-side frameworks as well.
Models
All non-partial views and layouts in the MVC templates use a model of type IPageViewModel<T>
where T must be a descendent of PageData
. The IPageViewModel
interface defines a CurrentPage
property as well as a couple of properties geared towards layouts and framework components. This way, all views including layout files, can rely on some common characteristics of the view model.
To free controllers from having to populate these common properties on the view model, an action filter named PageContextActionFilter
is registered globally at startup. This filter inspects the view model which is about to be passed to the view and, given that it is of type IPageViewModel
, sets the common properties required by the site’s framework.
Should a specific controller or action want to influence the common properties of the view model, it can do so by populating them on the view model as the filter then will not modify them. Alternatively, a controller can implement an interface named IModifyLayout
that tells the filter to pass the Layout property of the view model to the controller after having populated it with default values.
An example of a controller which implements IModifyLayout
is the controller for the preview page, PreviewController
. It modifies the view model in order to instruct the view to hide the site’s header and footer.
View locations and a default controller
The Alloy templates have a controller named DefaultPageController
, which can handle all page types and simply returns a view result with a view location set to /Views/<page_type_name>/Index.cshtml.
This lets you add views for page types by following the above convention for view locations. For page types that require a controller, all we need to do is to create one which is more specific in terms of what page type it handles.
A custom view location expander
There are different ways to create partial renderers, templates for pages and blocks in content areas and such when using ASP.NET MVC Core. Like:
- create a view component
- create a partial view in the /Views/Shared folder whose name matches the type name of the content type or,
- create a partial view which is registered at startup using a class that implements the
IViewTemplateModelRegistrator
interface (see theTemplateCoordinator
class)
The Alloy templates use the two latter approaches extensively. Partly because a view component is not really needed for many of the blocks in Alloy. As a result, the /Views/Shared folder contains a lot of views, which makes it difficult to find a specific one. Therefore, the templates feature a custom view location expander, SiteViewLocationExpander
, which adds two additional folders in which the partial views for CMS content can be stored – /Views/Shared/PagePartials and /Views/Shared/Blocks.
Content area rendering
The Alloy templates feature a customized rendering of content areas.
To support the design requirements for the Alloy website, we implemented a class called AlloyContentAreaRenderer
for custom rendering of content areas. See the CustomizedRenderingInitialization
class to see how we make CMS use our custom renderer for all content areas.
Error handling
The Alloy templates contain a bonus feature in the form of the ErrorHandlingContentRenderer
class. This class is registered as the default type for the IContentRenderer
interface during the site’s initialization. It wraps the CMS default implementation and extends it to provide error handling while rendering partial content.
This has the effect that an exception, of a number of non-critical types, thrown while rendering a block or page in a content area will not crash the entire page. Instead, it will simply hide the failing partial content. If the HTTP request is made by an editor, it renders an error message that can be reported to a developer.

Note
The error handling is only in place if the application is not attached to a debugger. When attached to a debugger, the request is probably made by a developer and then the standard error handling is used instead, allowing developers to more easily see the error message and stack trace.
Beyond making the site more robust, this functionality also illustrates the flexibility of CMS API.
Navigation components
The Alloy templates feature a single extension method for the HtmlHelper
class named MenuList
which is used to build all three navigations components on the Alloy site – the top menu, the sub navigation and the breadcrumbs.

While there are many possible ways to build each of those navigation elements for an MVC site, the MenuList
method is especially designed for flexibility through the use of Razor
helpers.
The method takes a root page and a Razor
helper as argument. It fetches the children of the root page and filter them based on whether they should be visible to the current visitor and whether they should be displayed in navigation or not. Finally, it invokes the Razor
helper once for each page.
As Razor
helpers are essentially C# code it can be used for many different things, especially since the Razor
helpers can recursively invoke themselves.
Dependency resolving
ASP.NET MVC is designed for testability and flexibility, and CMS features the abstractions necessary to utilize that. Therefore, almost all communication with the API is kept out of the views and placed in separate classes and, to a lesser extent, in the controllers.
To let us switch out components without modifying controllers and to make the code practical to write unit tests for, all dependencies in controllers are injected through their constructors. In ASP.NET MVC, dependencies for controllers and other components are resolved using a DependencyResolver
. The templates feature such a class, ServiceLocatorDependencyResolver
, which is set as the default dependency resolver through the DependencyResolverInitialization
initialization module.
The dependency resolver wraps the IoC container used by the CMS itself, meaning that we do not have to register implementations for the CMS API. Custom classes in the templates generally do not have corresponding interfaces but instead have virtual methods. This means that we do not have to register them while maintaining the ability to write unit tests for code that relies on such types.
Updated about 1 month ago