Also avaialble in the Sitecore Marketplace

Building a custom field type in Sitecore with support for Content and Page Editor isn’t particularly hard. Specifically, for a “picker” field you would need:

• New field type definition in the core database
• New field type backing class
• Content Editor control with select and clear message handlers
• XML control (markup and codebeside) that renders the ‘picker’ dialog
• WebEdit command for Page Editor
• A renderField pipeline extension to customize how field value renders in Page Editor
• A renderContentEditor pipeline extension to bring in extra resources into Content Editor

Here at BrainJocks we have recently created a few of these experiences and decided to open source one - YouTube Video Picker.

It’s a fully workable solution. Feel free to use it in your project or explore as a study guide. We also published a series of blog posts about it:

• Part 1 - http://jockstothecore.com/youtube-video-picker-part-1-introduction/
• Part 2 - http://jockstothecore.com/youtube-video-picker-part-2-prototype/
• Part 3 - http://jockstothecore.com/youtube-video-picker-part-3-sitecore-citizenship/
• Part 4 - http://jockstothecore.com/youtube-video-picker-part-4-xml-control/

The project uses TDS and is structured the way we structure all our Sitecore projects (more details here - part 1, part 2). Once you pull it down please:

More installation and configuration instructions.

The raw value of the field is the YouTube video ID so you can render it any way you like on the actual website. Content Editor experience is built-in. When it comes to Page Editor, the pipeline extensions will do all the work so all you do is:

@Html.Sitecore().Field("Video One")

to render a default (small) thumbnail or:

@Html.Sitecore().Field("Video One", new { Size = YouTubeVideoField.ThumbnailSize.Medium})

to specify the size of how you like the thumbnail rendered.

We are 100% MVC with Sitecore but the field type itself has no MVC dependency and can be as easily used with other rendering technologies

The TDS.Master and TDS.Master.Content projects have Sitecore definition items for a very basic demonstration. Install it on top of a vanilla Sitecore installation and your Home item will have two additional youtube fields and customized layout details (layout and rendering)