Add contextual code to an item in Sitecore

One of the most useful customization of Sitecore is the ability to add contextual code to an item in Sitecore. For example let say we have a page in Sitecore that works well in the English language. A content author wants to create the same page in french. Unfortunately there isn't an out of the box way to copy the English page content (including all child items) into french.  This is where adding contextual code will help. 

To do this you would have to install Sitecore powershell extensions. There are lots of documentations online about this tool. 

To add contextual code to an item in Sitecore, you would need to add a new module to the powershell script library located at

/sitecore/system/Modules/PowerShell/Script Library/

Under this module you can add any powershell scripts you want under the context menu node. 

Make sure to enable the module and you should see these script under any item. You can even modify the rule section to determine which items you want to allow these scripts to be available to. The below code is an example script of creating a fr-CA version of the current item and children. 

$dialog = Show-Confirm -Title "Are you sure you want to create a fr-CA version of the current item and children (skip if exists)?" if($dialog -eq "yes"){ $item = Get-Item . if ($item.Children.Count -lt 20) { Add-ItemLanguage $item -Language "en" -TargetLanguage "fr-CA" -IfExist Skip -Recurse Write-Host "fr-CA versions added successfully!" } else { Write-Host "No version added since item has more than 20 children." } } Write-Host "End of Script!"

You can add pretty much anything here, but I would caution to think about what ways this could get abused. For example in the above code I added a limit of 20 children that this script would work for. This is so that a content author does not inadvertently use this on a home node and cause the entire site to get updated. Hope this is useful to someone else. But please use with caution.