In my last blog post from many years ago, I provided various ways that a multi-site Episerver solution could be architected. If you haven't read that post yet, you should do so before continuing with this one.

One of the ways I mentioned is by using MVC Areas, which Episerver does support with a little bit of work. In the time that post was written, I've gotten to build a couple multi-site Episerver solutions using MVC Areas, and I'd like to share some of my approaches to make the development and content editing process smoother.

This post is the first in a series of posts related to architecting and developing multi-site Episerver solutions using MVC Areas. In this post, I'll cover the high-level architecture decisions we've made, and what was involved in creating that base framework.

You may be aware that Episerver is a powerful platform that can be used for more than just a single website. You can utilize the underlying functionality of the platform to handle large-scale management of multiple websites in one single environment. Editors can share content throughout multiple sites, administrators can quickly launch new sites, and developers can work with one code base and database, making the sites easier to maintain.

Let's focus on the development of these multi-site Episerver solutions. How do you actually architect and develop these solutions? If you've ever tried to search for Episerver's best practices around this topic, you'll likely come up short. Sure, there's some documentation on Episerver World, but the documentation doesn't really provide any good guidelines or starting points. That's really because there's no correct way to do it. The Episerver platform doesn't force development teams to use any specific conventions when developing the multi-site solution.

So in this post, I want deep-dive into this topic to provide some considerations and approaches that you should think about before starting development on your next multi-site Episerver solution.

This post was derived from a book I read many years ago called “An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything” by Chris Hadfield. This actually started as a talk I gave while working at Nansen, and it was meant for more than just the developers. I really enjoyed this book because it's more than just an autobiography of Chris Hadfield's life, and it provides some great thoughts and takeaways that be applied to your professional career.

With the breaking change release of Episerver CMS 11, the underlying functionality for TinyMCE has been moved into a separate NuGet package and updated to the next major version. One of the biggest changes with TinyMCE version 2 for Episerver, aside from the new editor based on TinyMCE v4, is that you can no longer customize the TinyMCE editor from the CMS Admin area. Now, all changes are done through code. and the way that you make these customizations have changed dramatically. So let's look at the new way to add valid elements into TinyMCE version 2 for Episerver.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about how to add valid elements to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor in Episerver 7. While the same process generally remains for newer version of Episerver, there are some small updates to my previous post that makes it much easier and quicker. In this post, I'll show you the updated way to add valid elements to TinyMCE.