Fun times with Sitecore and .NET

Sitecore does a great job of separating content from the presentation of the content. This is the main selling point of any CMS tool, but Sitecore does an excellent job of allowing this to happen. What I found not intuitive in Sitecore is the ability to display shared content. PROBLEM For instance, assume you have stories which live outside of the context of any site site. The stories can be tagged with specific categories, where each category associates to a different web site. (ok, this is a simple example, but follow me here). So you have the following structure in your sitecore tree /sitecore/content/site 1 .. [all of the nodes that make up the site] /sitecore/content/site 2 ..[all of the nodes that make up the site] /sitecore/content/Stories 2010 January Story Item 1 [category = site 1] Story Item 2 [category = site 1 and site 2] February Story Item 1 [category = site 1 and site 2] ...etc [you get the picture] POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS Wh

We use the Shadowbox component on our web site. How we use the shadowbox is whenever an image is displayed the user can decide if they want the image to be clickable to open up a video or other media content (podcast). In our first web site in Sitecore the users had to put the shadowbox parameters inside the html. This was not a good seperation of presentation and content. But our first site had to be up quick, so we went with the easiest albeit harder to maintain approach. Now the users groan whenever they have to enter parameters for a shadowbox link or other html that they must enter into the content. So the goal for our future sites is to seperate presentation from content as much as possible (and have exceptions when necessary). After batting around a few ideas on how to implement the shadowbox parameters needed into Sitecore I came to the following conclusions: I did not want to add a new field type, that would require too much work. I'm pretty lazy :). No, actual