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'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'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 during a project where I was converting a site to new templates for a rebuild, I was automating the creation of the new items and needed to know if the current page had any layout overrides on the item. It was necessary for me to compare each page's layout definition against the layout definition assigned to its standard value. If you've never ventured into the standard fields let alone the raw values of an item you might find this useful. The layout fields are stored as xml and keep references to all devices, sublayouts and layouts assigned to it. I ended up writing a few classes that hand