Project Lifecycle

Since there were some significant changes in Sitecore's RTE when they upgraded to Telerik's new libraries from Sitecore 6.3 to 6.4. I'd written previously about adding buttons to the RTE before and was lookin for a good reason to write a supplemental article. Thankfully the new editor actually simplifies a bit of what you'll need to do from the earlier version of Sitecore.

I was recently asked by a content editor how to insert a YouTube video on a page in Sitecore and after thinking about the best approach to respond with my options were to tell the user to change to HTML mode in the Rich Text E

I've recently needed to setup an extranet for several websites and began researching. There are several helpful articles on the topic. I found bolaky.net and blog.wojciech.org as well as using Sitecore's Security API and Security Administrator cookbooks. Although there was enough information to get me started, what I found was disjointed and there were a few specifics that weren't detailed. After some testing I was able to create a functioning extranet and in an effort to create a more comprehensive article I have detailed my results.

1. Create Extranet Sublayouts

The first thing you'll want to

If you've ever worked with Sitecore for any length of time you've worked with an item ID. It's in the form: {7294ECFC-0C37-44AD-B728-ABA259B18889}. There are times when you need to pass the ID around through querystring values or other visible locations but don't want to deal with all the troubles of encoding/decoding the entity characters or just because it's damn ugly. You can, however, convert the ID to just it's alpha-numeric character sequence known in Sitecore as a ShortID. When you convert the previous ID to a ShortID and print the value, the result string will look like this: 7294ECFC0

This article is a follow-up to an article written previously by John West about embedding web controls in Rich Text Editors.

I spent some good time using web controls in the Rich Text Editor to allow content editors to implement complex functionality inline without a lot of strain. It's a step up from using code snippets where you don't want a content editor to have to switch to html mode to set html attributes or other behind-the-scenes elements.

For those of you not familiar with web controls or server controls it's basically a custom asp.net tag in the form <customTagPrefix:customTagName>. I

There are lots of ways to add css classes to sites and I've covered how to setup stylesheets for multi-site installations, but if you're only building a single site on Sitecore and you're looking to quickly populate the class drop down, or any of the other rich text editor settings for that matter, then this is for you.

The settings for the rich text editor are stored in the Telerik Tools File. The file is located under /website/sitecore/shell/controls/Rich Text Editor/ToolFile.xml.

There are all the settings for the drop down fields stored here. I'm not going to go through them all but I'll qu

Many of the projects I've worked on over the past several years have required importing data either from SQL or from an existing Sitecore installation itself. The original application was a page form that imported data from a database and was developed by Mark Graber, Sitecore MVP and employee at Agency Oasis. Each time I've used it I improve on it and have since retooled it as an internal Sitecore application. I've recently cleaned it up to be a reusable, customizable application and am releasing it as a shared source module. You can find it on Sitecore Shared Source, or by getting the SVN re

I've long given up on using the User Manager paging buttons until yesterday when looking over the known issues, I found an article describing a solution to my problem on SDN. Knowing at least one other individual that has had the same issue I thought I'd do a write up to bring attention to it so that the anyone else with the same issue can get back use of their user manager.  

The problem was that on the UserManager, the paging buttons (shown below) simply didn't work.

With a long list of users I would often cringe at the thought of the day when I wouldn't know the name of the user I was trying

*the code was updated 8/2/2011 with some insight from Mrunal Brahmbhatt. Much appreciated.

 So I recently upgraded my system to Sitecore 6.4 from Sitecore 6.2 and was pumped about a lot of the new features like multi-browser support, new Rich Text Editor but mostly, the new built-in multi-target cache management system. Now I have to say that when I heard the words "partial cache clearing" I completely misunderstood what it meant. I thought it was partial html cache clearing thinking that when a single page got published, just that item was removed from cache. The truth is that when anyone publ

If you're on a Sitecore environment pre-6.3 and you're using the Sitecore Stager you may have noticed that each publish will clear the entire HTML for a site. This may be fine for you but I like to have more granular control over the cache so I've updated the source code a bit to clear only entries related to the published items. I'm not going to knock the Sitecore Stager, it's an excellent utility. Plus this why they release source code in the first place.

This idea may appeal to you and if it does you should be aware of the pro's and con's of this approach. Let's first go over how cache entr

So while doing a dry run of an upgrade from Sitecore 6.2 to Sitecore 6.4, I noticed something that stopped working in my rich text editor: dynamic stylesheets. I have a large multi-site platform and it's using code from the dynamic stylesheets SDN Article to set a unique stylesheet in the wysiwyg editor for each site. The Telerik codebase has changed a bit and the rich text editor has also. So I'll go through what I did to get it working so you can shortcut the hassle. The first thing you'll need to know is that the file loading the rich text editor is now located at EditorPage.aspx instead of