Insert Options – Individual Items, Standard Values or Rules

Insert Options – Individual Items, Standard Values or Rules

Feb 1st, 2010 by Alex de Groot

A very common question I receive is that people don’t know anymore where to setup Insert Options. Especially with the new possibilities of the Sitecore 6.1 content management system.

Here’s my view on this:

1. Individual item
   Rarely, you want to setup Insert Options on individual items. Something when you have a specific folder or section in your website, you might chose for this option. Keep in mind that this you always should have a valid reason.
   For example: For all my meta data I use the /Common/Folder template to store my item underneath. As these folders have only 1 specific setting(Insert Options), I’ve decided not to Subtemplate(create a new template and inherit from the Folder-template) the Folder-template, because of maintainability. Consider in that case Insert Option Rules.
2. Branch Templates
   It’s a bad practice to set any Insert Options on Branch templates.
3. Standard Values
   95% of the cases setup your Insert Options on Standard Values as it’s applied everywhere when you use the specific template.
4. Insert Options Rules
   When you need to setup global conditions, like ‘All the items based on the Folder template containing the word ‘Blog’ should add the Blog Entry template as Insert Option’.
   We use it ourselves in the Marketing Center. We allow everybody to create folders, but we want them to create specific items underneath.
   Before setting up a rule, figure out if you can’t do it with Standard Values.

Trimming the list afterwards can always be done by settings up Insert Rules.
For an advanced Reference regarding these Content Infrastructure topics, please refer to Data Definition Reference.

Posted in Sitecore