Customize Sitecore Device Editor Dialog

In this blog post I am going to explain how to enhance Sitecore Device Editor Dialog and give enhanced experience to Content editors. Let’s take a simple scenario where you have added same rendering or sublayout multiple times on page item. Refer to below screenshot of Launch Sitecore MVC website where Abstract Spot rendering is added multiple times.

Content editors may find themselves in a situation where they wish to edit a particular section of page and they might get confused by seeing same rendering multiple times. They have to go through each rendering and check the data source and placeholder to identify which rendering is added to display that particular section of page and situation becomes worse and more confusing if same rendering is added multiple times.

To solve this challenge, I’ve modified Device Editor Dialog and added one field (Rendering Description) which stores helper text related to particular rendering. Check Abstract Spot rendering in below screenshot which is added multiple times.

Enter rendering description is optional and you won’t face any error if content editors are not entering any values in it.

Installation:

1. Download Sitecore Package from here for Sitecore 8 version.
2. Install downloaded Sitecore package and restart Sitecore client.  

Uninstallation:

1. Delete Item {6526A54E-B8C0-432D-9C9C-0998178BFB88} or /sitecore/templates/System/Layout/Rendering Parameters/Standard Rendering Parameters/General/Description
2. Delete AdvancedDeviceEditor.dll from bin folder
3. Delete DeviceEditor.xml and DeviceRendering.xml from \Website\sitecore\shell\Override\Applications\Layouts\DeviceEditor 
   

Source code is available on github. Comments and suggestions are most welcome. Happy coding!