World is now on Opti ID! Learn more

John-Philip Johansson
Feb 4, 2019
  49
(0 votes)

Making Blocks editable in a Content Area without Razor

To get an editing overlay on On-Page Edit (OPE) for a content area is quite easy. It's like any other editable property: add the data-epi-edit="PropertyName" attribute (CMS UI 11.16.0, earlier versions require three attributes, see blog post). Depending on your markup you might have to put the attribute on a parent element, otherwise the overlays might get shifted due to styling.

Example from MusicFestival's LandingPage.vue:

<div v-epi-edit="'MainContentArea'">
	<ContentArea :model="model.mainContentArea"></ContentArea>
</div>

This enables the content area overlay, but not for the contents in it. You can still work with it using the content area menu that shows up when clicking the content area. It allows re-ordering, dragging and dropping content, and creating new blocks.

blobid0.png

If you want a nicer experience, similar to when using the @Html.PropertyFor() helper in Razor, then you just need to add the block id to each block as a HTML attribute: data-epi-block-id="TheContentLink".

Example from MusicFestival's ContentArea.vue:

<div :key="index" v-for="(block, index) in model" class="Grid-cell" :class="getDisplayOption(block.displayOption)">
	<BlockComponentSelector :data-epi-block-id="isEditable ? block.contentLink.id : null" :model="block"></BlockComponentSelector>
</div>

imagen31q.png

If you're using the ContentDeliveryAPI add-on then the block id is available on the block's contentLink.id. As you can see above, the blocks are rendered by a ContentArea Vue.js component by iterating over the blocks given by the page's model.mainContentArea. The block overlay is only used when rendered in a content area, so it's not necessary to always set it (which would have been the case if we added the id in BlockComponentSelector.vue instead).

One non-obvious detail might be the conditional to only render the data-epi-block-id when the variable isEditable is true. This is to avoid rendering the property in View mode. It's a good idea to avoid leaking details about your CMS or server to your site visitors. :)

Read more

Developer Guides:

MusicFestival has been updated: https://github.com/episerver/musicfestival-vue-template/blob/master/src/MusicFestival.Vue.Template/Assets/Scripts/components/ContentArea.vue

Feb 04, 2019

Comments

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Make Global Assets Site- and Language-Aware at Indexing Time

I had a support case the other day with a question around search on global assets on a multisite. This is the result of that investigation. This co...

dada | Jun 26, 2025

The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request – when configuring Azure Storage for an older Optimizely CMS site

How to fix a strange issue that occurred when I moved editor-uploaded files for some old Optimizely CMS 11 solutions to Azure Storage.

Tomas Hensrud Gulla | Jun 26, 2025 |

Enable Opal AI for your Optimizely products

Learn how to enable Opal AI, and meet your infinite workforce.

Tomas Hensrud Gulla | Jun 25, 2025 |

Deploying to Optimizely Frontend Hosting: A Practical Guide

Optimizely Frontend Hosting is a cloud-based solution for deploying headless frontend applications - currently supporting only Next.js projects. It...

Szymon Uryga | Jun 25, 2025

World on Opti ID

We're excited to announce that world.optimizely.com is now integrated with Opti ID! What does this mean for you? New Users:  You can now log in wit...

Patrick Lam | Jun 22, 2025

Avoid Scandinavian Letters in File Names in Optimizely CMS

Discover how Scandinavian letters in file names can break media in Optimizely CMS—and learn a simple code fix to automatically sanitize uploads for...

Henning Sjørbotten | Jun 19, 2025 |