So I'm attending the "Enhancing search for Lucene" because I've been using Lucene lightly for years but haven't had the time to fully vet it for more mainstream use. I love it for its speed and flexibility but I have lingering questions about the memory/cpu costs while rebuilding large indexes on production servers. Overall I just want to get a feel about how other people are using it and any pitfalls they've run into.
I'm extremely excited about the number of people who are in attendance for the Brightcove Sitecore connector. This was as you may or may not know a labor of love for me since it's built off of my open source library Sukiyoshi on Google Code.
Agency Oasis did add a number of features into the original connector such as automated system syncs, video sublayouts, patch configuration file, the analytical tracking for player events, tighter process queue control, the lucene search fields and the use of snippets instead of web controls.
The developer keynote was kicked off with the venerable Lars Nielsen whose presence implies Sitecore has been able to maintain its brain trust through it's explosive growth over recent years.
Immediate: Relevant: Predictive. That's where Sitecore is taking us this year. The demo of the well known Nikam fake product website was telling of how they're looking towards a more integrated toolset. Sitecore isn't selling their product as a standalone utility, but more of a tool that helps you integrate your increasingly growing end points to help you draw a more complete image of your entity.
I'm at Sitecore Symposium in sunny Las Vegas and I'm going to be writing a series of articles covering the developer track that I'm attending. I'll be trying to live blog where I can.
So far I've met a lot of great people starting with the New England Sitecore user group that filled the plane I was on to get here. There's also a lot of great partners like Oasis, where I originally cut my teeth, and Velir. There's also a lot of great tech companies in attendance like Brightcove who is obiously near and dear to my heart.
It's Sitecore's largest most energetic showing. There's also a record number of people in attendance. All in all the event should be a standout for not only the developers who already love the platform but especially for the clients who are coalescing around Sitecore to power their growing web strategies.
So while preparing my Sitecore system for a future upgrade to 6.5 I noticed that there were a lot of fields that were using deprecated field types. It's not a surprise since the original system was built on 5.3 but it's one of those things that's easily overlooked. It can seem daunting at first to update all the templates on a running system but the field types have more to do with how the fields are managed than whether or not the data gets removed from the database. The good news is that the deprecated fields all have an analogous field that it can be upgraded to easily. Well, except the server file field, which I have not found any matching field for but that's probably not being used by anyone but Sitecore. Here's what I've come up with as a cheatsheet that should speed up your upgrade a bit.
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 Editor (RTE) or for me to install one of the Shared Source Modules. I looked over YouTube Integration and as thoughtfully designed as it was I thought it would require too much effort for something I thought could be much simpler. I decided to extend the RTE with an additional button that opened a dialog window you could paste the IFrame embed code into.
*(updated on 5/30/2014) For those interested, I have released an Extranet Module to manage creating and removing an extranet for your site.
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.
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: 7294ECFC0C3744ADB728ABA259B18889. It's still a long value but useful in other ways. The following code sample converts a ShortID string value to an item and then back to a ShortID string.
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.