It’s been a while since the last update to Revolver so this release is long overdue. Today I have released version 2 of Revolver, the scripting module for Sitecore. The timing of this release is in preparation for Sitecore Symposium Australia where I’ll be presenting on scripting with Sitecore. Of course I’ll be covering Revolver and I will also be covering other scripting modules...
Recently I was asked what I like the most about Sitecore. There are many reason’s I like Sitecore, but one stand out reason is it’s extensibility. I like how I can extend Sitecore’s UI and processes to add my own functionality or change how Sitecore works to meet my client’s requirements. So, extending the Sitecore UI. On a recent project we had a requirement to provide a utility that was context...
I almost can’t remember the last time I built a website and it was the first for an organisation. The internet is old enough now that everyone already has a website, so new builds now are to replace an existing web presence. Whenever replacing an existing site we need to consider how the changes could impact on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and in particular, how to maintain whatever rank your...
The Sitecore WebForms for Marketers (WFM) module is a great module providing content authors the ability to create and edit their own simple data collection forms without having to tap a developer. It comes with a range of prebuilt “actions” which act on the data being submitted through the form. The most common actions would probably be the “save to database” action which saves the submitted form...
So what is a dynamic role? A dynamic role is one where membership is dynamically determined instead of statically assigned. The normal Sitecore roles are statically assigned to a user. They never change. Sitecore also contain 2 dynamic roles: the Everyone role and the Creator-Owner role. Inclusion in these roles is determined dynamically. OK, the Everyone role may not be quite so dynamic, but the...
Whenever I talk about unit testing and Sitecore, someone inevitably will ask about the practise of mocking. Mocking involves creating a simple object to replace a dependency in your unit tests so your test code doesn’t have to invoke that dependency. The issue I’ve had with mocking is that you have to deeply understand the object you’re mocking or your mocks won’t be a reflection of the dependency...
Sitecore’s Digital Marketing Suite (DMS) comes with some handy reports out of the box for analysing searches your users are performing on your Sitecore site. There’s both a high level report in the executive dashboard for site wide searches and also item reports for checking search terms leading to an item and searches performed on an item. All these reports assist in helping you work out what...
The Email Campaign Manager (ECM) for Sitecore is a great tool for sending bulk email and newsletters to your users and subscribers. I had an interesting question from a client recently about the Email Campaign Manager. “How can I send an email to a subset of the subscribers?” I’ll give you a scenario to describe the request. Let’s say I have a user base of national partners, but I only want to...
Today I have made several updates to the WeBlog module for Sitecore and published release 2.1. Go grab it now from http://trac.sitecore.net/WeBlog. Here’s a few significant changes to the module. Akismet Does your WeBlog blog get swamped with spam? Are you wasting lots of manual effort on weeding it out? Then you’ll love this new feature. WeBlog 2.1 introduces Akismet support. Akismet is a...
This year was the first year that Sitecore’s Dreamcore conference was held in Australia. And I for one jumped at the opportunity to speak at it. One topic that quite interests me is unit testing, and if you’ve read my posts over the years you’d see I have come up with a variety of techniques for getting unit testing (or rather, integration testing) working for Sitecore projects. So what better...
This Thursday (well, it will be Thursday for me, Wednesday if you’re on the other side of the date line) I’ll be presenting to the Sitecore Users Virtual Group on testing strategies for Sitecore. This is the same talk I gave at Dreamcore this year, so if you missed out, here’s another opportunity to see me talk about some testing techniques. Details can be found here:...
Ealier this year in April, Sitecore’s Dreamcore US event was held in Boston. One of my WeBlog colleagues, Nick Wesselman, gave a presentation at the event on the shared source WeBlog module. There was quite a lot of buzz around the module, especially from Sitecore themselves, who saw what we were doing with the module as a great example of Sitecore community.
It was my great pleasure to present at Sitecore’s Dreamcore event in Sydney, Australia this week. This was the first time the conference was held in Australia and it was fantastic with lots of great speakers and interesting people. My session was titled “Testing Strategies for Sitecore” and was run in the developer stream, so it focused on automated/unit testing. As promised for everyone who...
I’ve recently had the opportunity to get to know the Sitecore eCommerce Fundamental Edition or SEFE for short. One of our clients wanted to port their existing online shop to Sitecore which we’d used to rebuild their site. The main reason I chose SEFE was due to the fact that SEFE IS Sitecore and is built completely in Sitecore. All other eCommerce platforms I assessed were external applications...
One of the many benefits of using a good CMS like Sitecore is the ability to reuse a single piece of content in multiple locations around your site. This ability is provided through virtual items. So what is a virtual item? A virtual item is an item that doesn’t actually exist. Why wouldn’t you want the item to exist? One reason would be to keep your content tree clean and another would be to...
Recently I had to create a list of reference items in Sitecore that was a few hundred items long. Doing this exercise manually would have been mind numbing and taken a few hours out of my day. Thanks goodness for Revolver! Revolver contains the split command which can be used to split larger strings up. Combined with the echo command which can be used to input text from files and I’ve got the...
One of the most valuable lessons I learnt whilst doing unit testing with Sitecore projects was to ensure my tests were robust and repeatable. I went through a lot of pain in my earlier projects with brittle tests that as soon as one test failed, all the others would start failing. All this instability was to do with the test data I was using. I had a small amount of test content that I assumed was...
Recently I was designing a feature on a site that required dynamic behaviours. This kind of thing is right up the Sitecore rules engine’s alley so I made use of it in the design. But the use of the rules engine had larger benefits than simply meeting the requirements. More on that in just a second. Before getting too far into this blog post I feel I should make mention of Sitecore 6.5 which landed...
Yesterday I released Revolver 1.2 for Sitecore 6.4. Releases for other Sitecore versions should be available over the next few days. Along with a few bug fixes and behind the scenes stuff the following list provides a brief overview of updates made to Revolver for the 1.2 release. Maximum Query Results Warning Sitecore query provides a nice way to query for Sitecore items using an XPath like...
Recently I was asked by another developer about what options we had in Sitecore for long running processes. It wasn’t until I had to list them out all at once did I realise just how many options there are, all with their appropriate uses. Sitecore contains a very visual and engaging UI. And when it goes away to do something for a long time, it will provide feedback to the user so they know what’s...