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Posts from 2009

Get your workflow in order

I really like workflow in Sitecore. It's simple but powerful. The workbox is a great view into workflow and anything that needs my attention. By default, the workbox displays items in workflow states ordered by name. At times it would be nice if I could order by some other attribute like the updated field. So let's add sorting functionality to the workbox. We'll start by adding another ribbon...

Extending the Sitecore image processor

You've no doubt used the dynamic image manipulation capabilities of Sitecore before. This feature allows you to dynamically manipulate images from the media library using the query string. For example, to request an image with width 150 I would append w=150 into the query string: http://domain/~/media/images/myimage.ashx?w=150 Sitecore will then dynamically scale this image to 150 pixels wide...

Warning: Memory leaks ahead

Hang on, memory leaks? But this is .net where memory leaks are a thing of the past. If you've never done C or C++ before, then you've probably never had the enjoyment of searching through your code looking for memory leaks. A memory leak is memory an application allocates, but doesn't deallocate when it's done with it. .net solved this issue by not letting the developer manage the memory of the...

WCF Trace Tool

I've been doing a fair bit of WCF lately. And an absolute nightmare of an error to try to debug is the "Channel was in a faulted state" error. This is a very generic error and doesn't really say much at all about the cause of the error. The way WCF communicates is through channels. When a channel is in the faulted state, it means the construction and opening of a channel failed for some...

Multiple sites and the Preview Interface

I experienced a very weird issue the other day that was to do with the preview interface. When I set a publish restriction by date on a particular item for a future date, although the preview interface respected the date restriction, when I changed the preview date it's as if the interface ignored the date. No matter what I changed the preview date to, the interface wouldn't show me my item. Now,...

The Sitecore Australian and New Zealand users group

In a recent post, Phil Heltewig announced the Sitecore Australian and New Zealand users group (SCAUG although this is being changed to include our New Zealand members to SCANZUG). This is a community run group to support anyone who develops in or uses Sitecore in the Australia and New Zealand region. And who should it be headed up by? Well, that would be me :) . Although this group is for people...

External Application inside Sitecore Desktop

Recently I had to integrate Sitecore with an external application written in PHP. The integration included making the PHP application appear inside the Sitecore desktop, so it would appear to the end user that the external application was actually a part of Sitecore. Now, this is actually quite easy to do as we can make any ASPX page an application inside the Sitecore desktop. An application...

PNG curse? Solve it with a link.

This is another post which starts out with me reading another post :) . I was reading the Molten Core blog which is written by Thomas Eldblom (fellow MVP) and Jens Mikkelsen. Thomas published a post in which he points out the large number of PNG icon files included in Sitecore. Sitecore contains an extensive icon library consisting of 1,000's of files. And each of these files is provided in...

No Workflow for Web

I was reading a post by Alex Shyba recently which showed how you can get workflow history using the Sitecore API. This post reminded me of a post I was going to write a while ago on the subject of the workflow APIs. At the bottom of the above post, Alex points out that you could use the code in a workflow email action to get the history and send an email to the user who submitted the item into the...

It's official, welcome the MVPs!

Well, it's official. Today Sitecore made a press release about this years MVPs. And I am so proud to finally be able to say that I am now a Sitecore MVP. I join 12 others from the wider Sitecore community who have all been named MVPs by Sitecore. Read the press release for more details on what the MVP program is, and how we all ended up there. So onto the congrats and thanks! Congratulations to...

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