In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a nice thumbnail image that you can use within the Episerver page creation screen in order to make your CMS a little bit nicer for content editors to use. Within Episerver, content icons are the little images that get rendered within the create a new block or page screen:

How To Quickly Create Content Icons In Episerver 1

Content icons tend to get forgotten about on a lot of projects that I've encountered. The aim of this post is to nip that in the bud. If you want to learn to be a content icon ICON, read on 🔥🔥🔥

Episerver Content Icons

If you are in charge of an Episerver project you have two aims. One goal is to make the front-end look good. The second is to make a good content editing experience for content editors. Content icons can make it easier for content editors to understand the purpose of each page and block. If you have access to a designer to build these icons great. All you need to do is create an image of 300x300. Within each page or block type definition, simply reference the image using the ImageUrl attribute.

If you do not have access to a designer, a very quick and dirty solution to generate these preview images is to use an online text/image generation tool like www.cooltxt.com. Simply write the name of the page or block into the image creation screen within www.cooltxt.com and use that as the preview icon. If you are stuck for ideas on how to style the image, you can use the following configuration:

  • File Format: PNG
  • Background Color: #7975BA
  • Text Size: 45
  • Image Height: 300 (uncheck auto)
  • Image Width: 300 (uncheck auto)
  • Alignment: Centered

Using this configuration will give you a preview image styled like this:

How To Quickly Create Content Icons In Episerver 2

Ideally, you would use the image wireframes, however, this type of preview image is still a much better experience compared to leaving the preview boxes empty🎨

How To Add A Content Icon To a Page or Block

To associate a preview image onto a block or page is simple enough. With your page or block definition add the ImageUrl attribute like this:

Add the ImageUrl attribute and point it to the location in your webroot where the image will live.

This tutorial is simple to implement, however, it is overlooked a lot and can really improve the backend experience. Happy Coding 🤘