Project Lifecycle

I wanted to write up an article that elaborates on a presentation I gave on some but not all of the new features that will be upcoming in Sitecore 7. Mostly I'm going to focus on the updates around Lucene search but I'll also touch on some of the other features as well. This will be a longer article so be warned.

I'd also like to preface this article by saying that one of the driving forces behind much of the change in Sitecore 7 is an increasing need to support large data sets. And don't dismiss this release thinking that there isn't a lot of value if you're system isn't that large. You don't

I recently had a request to detect the browser language for a multilingual site I support. Now this certainly isn't anything new and here's the canonical/obligatory John West post written about it. I'm not trying to rewrite what he's done. My solution is different and deals with different needs. The requirements I had were:

*set the context language to the browser language if the site has item versions in that language*if the user changes the language through a dropdown selector maintain the new language settings

These seemingly innocuous requirements add more complexity than you'd expect. The c

I recently spent some good quality time working to update the Data Importer Module. It's an incredibly useful tool and I wanted to address some feedback about it so that users can better understand what it can do and how you use it.

The module was originally developed to import content from existing websites into Sitecore. I had to pull all types of information from raw SQL databases used by other CMS'. It can save a lot of time and effort doing these imports because you create the import definitions they are stored in the Sitecore content tree and you can rerun it as needed. It helps when you

I've recently updated the Caching Manager module on the Sitecore Marketplace. The improvements were focused on the UI which I've made to mimic the native design of the content editor. It's a lot more compressed and easy to use. The different cache regions are broken into separate tabs and parts of the form are broken into sections. You can collapse the sections by double clicking on the title bar like you can in the content editor. There's use of Sitecore's icons and the buttons are better defined and the font size is smaller so that more fits on a screen.

There was also an update by Mark Ursi

This article details how to add fields to the Link Database, how Sitecore uses the FieldTypes.config to add items to the Link Database, issues with the DelimitedField type and how to create your own custom type to use in the FieldTypes.config.

Adding Fields to the Link Database

Setting up new or custom fields is pretty straight forward. In my initial research I found this article by John West to be quite helpful. There's two parts to getting a field setup with the link db: setting up the config entries and rebuilding the link db. You can add entries to the FieldTypes.config file or your own cu

I recently had the need to add a new template type for a single site on my multi-site system and wanted to be able to provide insert options for this template on content folders only in this site. The content folders are a global template and are shared across multiple sites so adding this new template type to the insert options of the content folder was not a viable option.

I know, from previous experience that rules engine would be great solution for this but there were a few additional constraints that I had which the default settings didn't provide for. I wanted to limit the scope of the ru

*Update 2

I also found that there was an issue with the <using> statements as well that required an attribute to be added. When I opened the Configure-Assign (Insert Options) or tried to add from template, I would get the following exception:

The type or namespace name 'EventArgs' could not be found.

Once I added an arbitrary attribute to the <using> tag it was fine.

*Update 1

So Sitecore Support got back to me pretty quickly and told me that if I just add an attribute that makes the reference unique that's how to solve the issue. Here's the relevant code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmln

After the last mind blowing talk by Tim Ward I decided it would be prudent to catch this talk about breaking the million item mark with content buckets. As if simply storing this much information wasn't enough of a challenge, he was also trying to solve the problem of quickly querying this data set based on a bit of meta information.   

Ultimately there are a lot of ways you can approach this kind of problem with varying degrees of success, but like the precocious individual he is, he decided on a custom solution called "Item Buckets".     

The item buckets are parent nodes that work in concert

I'm catching the talk on the field suite module presented by Tim Braga from Velir. I'm all about anything that improves the default set of fields provided out of the box from Sitecore. He was Also good enough to post the field suite module to the shared source modules.      

The first field he chose to deal with the multilist field. It becomes immediately obvious that there are some shortcomings in its usability. The list of selected items don't offer much in the way of context for where those items may be located in the content tree, whether or not they're published or, god forbid, the differe

Sitecore and the powershell is a talk I've been looking forward to for a while. I'm a one man team so my life revolves around automation. The thought of being able to streamline my process and shave time off the labor intensive tasks that I engage in regularly, easily keeps my attention.     

So the powershell is a windows utility that is built on top of the .NET library and provides a deep level of access to the system. The presenter is using, as an example, the task of installing a Sitecore instance through a powershell script. It's can be a common and time consuming task especially if you wo