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Posts from 2009

Custom Tokens and NVelocity for Item Creation

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...

Sitecore 6.2 RSS

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...

Firefox Content Editor Scrollbar Issue

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...

Extending the Control Panel

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...

Quietest...Release...Ever

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...

Few things going on in Sitecore land?

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....

Copy and Paste Items Server to Server

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...

Professionalism

There are a lot of qualities that constitute a professional. Take this take-away coffee that I just ordered. This is a take away coffee, served in a paper cup with one of those plastic lids. Even though the consumer can't see the top of the coffee due to the lid, the barista still went to the effort of pouring some latte art on it. This is one of those qualities that constitute a professional....

Team Development with Sitecore the Easy way

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;...

Composite Presentation Inheritance

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...

Techniques for Sharing Content

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...

User Group Meeting

Last night we held the first Sitecore Australia and New Zealand User Group meeting in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Note for anyone wanting to hold a user group meeting, don't do it in a noisy pub if you have presentations to make. :( I'd chosen what I thought would be a quiet pub for a Wednesday night. Unfortunately it wasn't so quiet. Tim Ward and myself both made presentations to the users....

OMS Analytics

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...

Distributed Authoring

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...

Item Auto Golive and Expire

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...

Introduction to SashimiCMS

I've recently made a few minor updates to SashimiCMS and released a new version 1.1.2. You can find SashimiCMS on my website at http://www.codeflood.net/sashimicms.

Magic unpublish button

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...

Find items which override standard values using Revolver

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...

Multi environment config

Managing multiple environment configurations for any project has always been a bit of a challenge. Even when you're still in development, and different developers have different folder structures and drive assignments which would affect the location of your data folder in Sitecore, not to mention when you move to QA and production where server names will most likely also change. There are many...

Multithreading with Delegates

Multithreaded code is becoming more common place. Even for web applications. This is largely due to the increasing number of cores appearing on CPUs these days. The chip manufacturers have come close to the limit in terms of how fast a chip can run before it starts to melt. So to continue increases in processing speed, instead of continuing to try and increase speed vertically by increasing chip...

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