Late last year I wrote a post exploring some techniques for sharing content inside Sitecore. One thing I didn’t really take into account was searching and indexing of this shared content. Paul recently left a comment on the post bringing this to my attention. Thanks Paul. So I’d like to address these issues now. The way in which your shared content is indexed will depend on the technique used as...
Well, Sitecore has just announced the newest members of the MVP club. You can read all about the 2009 MVPs and the MVP programme in Sitecore’s press release which you can find here: http://www.sitecore.net/News/Press-releases/2009/Sitecore-MVPs.aspx. I’d like to welcome to the club the following 2009 Sitecore MVPs. Guillaume Buat-Ménard from Aqueduct Jason Davey from Bullseye Sebastian Winslow...
It's been a very long ride, but the next minor version of Revolver has finally been released. If you currently hold a license for Revolver you can download the new version from the Revolver downloads page on the codeflood website. The quick start guide has also been updated. In case you haven't seen it yet, Revolver is a module I wrote for Sitecore to provide a command prompt inside the Sitecore...
We'd all be familiar with the tokens you can use in template standard values which get replaced on item creation in Sitecore. They are a great way to set some default field values based on some other data such as the name given to the item or the current date. The following lists the tokens available in Sitecore 6.2. $name: The name of the item being created $id: The ID of the item being...
When Sitecore 6.2 was released I wrote a post about some of the new features included in the release. One of which was inbuilt RSS. I think this feature was quite underplayed on my part, so allow me to make a song and dance about it here. The RSS capabilities of Sitecore 6.2 comes in 2 parts. The first is standard content RSS. It's now quite easy for content authors to create RSS feeds for their...
It was a real shame when Sitecore removed Firefox support when they released Sitecore 5.3. In prior versions of Sitecore you still had the option to log into the desktop from the login screen when using Firefox. And even though it didn't look quite as perfect as it did in IE, it was so much faster thanks to the faster javascript engine in Firefox. But there are ways around that. Check my previous...
Recently I had a situation where I needed to run a lengthy process inside my Sitecore solution which needed to run some custom code. The actual process itself was to update a separate Lucene index we were using for a user search component on an intranet. I prefer to perform user search against an index rather than the user store itself. Primarily for performance and secondly to provide more...
Sitecore 6.2 was released last night in probably the quietest release Sitecore has done in a long time. Why am I saying it was a quiet release? Well I had no idea it was coming and only found out after reading John West's blog and finding a reference to the new version hidden in one of his posts. Normally I should get an email from Sitecore about new releases, but nothing. So I'm doing my part for...
There's a few things going on at the moment in the world of Sitecore. Firstly the Sitecore Australian and New Zealand user group is having it's second user group meeting, this time in Sydney Australia on 28th October 2009. Tim Ward, Solution Architect for Sitecore Australia will be taking attendees through some of the new features of Sitecore 6.1 and some of the up coming features of Sitecore 6.2....
Sitecore has done a very good job of making item management in Sitecore very much like file management in your OS. Operations such as moving items, ordering items, copying and pasting items is as simple as a drag or a click. All this works quite well, but only for the current server you're on. If you have a look at the data on the clipboard after a copy command has run you'll see it contains the...
Most of the Sitecore implementations I'm involved in have me working in a team environment. In fact, this is pretty normal for any IT project. Although a team environment has many benefits, there are also some complexities that need to be addressed in terms of keeping the development environment in sync. There are two things that need to be synchronised across all the development environments;...
I have often wanted a way in Sitecore to be able to define most of my pages presentation in a base template but customise that presentation on more specific items. Sitecore has a facility to inherit default values through the use of data template standard values. This mechanism works for all fields including presentation (__renderings field). Sitecore 6 introduced inheritance through standard...
This post is based on the materials I recently presented to the Sitecore Australia & New Zealand User Group. Sitecore allows the sharing of content due to the separation of content from presentation. In fact, you can consider the presentation to itself be content as the presentation definition for an item is stored in a field; the __renderings field, whether the data for that field comes from...
With the release of Sitecore 6.1 and OMS last week, I can finally write about it! I was lucky enough a few months ago to be invited to a sneak peak session for Sitecore's new product the Online Marketing Suite (OMS), previously called "Everest" (Everest was actually the title given to Sitecore 6.1 and OMS 1.0). OMS is built on top of Sitecore 6.1 and provides more advanced marketing...
Recently I've been contemplating how Sitecore could handle distributed authoring. This was largely prompted by a request in a demonstration I was giving where the client had multiple offices and wanted each office to be able to author content in Sitecore with the best performance. Depending on your network rules, as long as Sitecore is exposed to the internet, then anyone on the internet can log...
Sitecore supports setting publishing restrictions on content items using dates for when the content should go live and when to take the content off the live site. I find many content authors expect these changes to their content to happen automatically, but in Sitecore's model a publish operation still needs to occur to have the changes affect the live database. This is because the Master database...
Recently I posted the question Alex de Groot asked the Sitecore community last year; "Show Sitecore how to improve..." (I paraphrased to "What's your Sitecore wishlist") to the Sitecore Australia and New Zealand users group. A few ideas flew around, one of which was a small feature request to have a magical "unpublish" button for content. Upon pushing this button the...
For a while now, the best practice for assigning presentation in Sitecore has been to apply the presentation to an item's template standard values rather than on the item itself. This has some distinct advantages. Firstly, presentation is usually defined by the type of the item, such as a list page or a news page. It makes sense that we have a central place in which to define the presentation for...
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...
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...