I've more recently released a video recap of the presentation I gave to the New England Sitecore User Group.
You've unlocked a door with a key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of clouds. A dimension of sites. A dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into, the Sitecore zone. (shocking music)
This article is about the theory of template development. A topic, which at its best, is dry and wonkish. My goal is to provoke thought and discussion but mostly to prevent others from having to continuously wander through this hedge maze until they invariably come to the same end. Besides that, there may be a better solution still that someone else has come up with.
One of the nicest features that came along in the last few Sitecore versions was the rules engine. Along with that power was the ability to harness the conditional sublayout rendering to change the datasource or component design based on specific visitor information, otherwise known as personalization. There's all kinds of identifiable markers that are available to you about your end users such as location and search keywords. You can use this information as is to create rules, you can create "profiles" which categorize your users to help you reach your intended audience and you can use those "profiles" to build "Engagement Plans". I don't plan on going into detail about how to create these profiles or engagement plans since it's a near science unto itself but I did find a quick guide on personalization terms and an excellent articles on setting up personalization profiles and creating engagement plans.
After you've decided what components your pages will be broken up into and created the sublayouts (renderings or server controls) each extending your base class, you can begin working on the setup inside Sitecore by configuring your component item's fields and setting up component insert options. These settings are stored on the sublayout items themselves and I'll detail them here.
As a shout out, this series started because I was recently speaking with Mark Ursino and he gave me a demonstration of a recent build where he had taken advantage of a few really slick features in Page Editor. I decided to do some research to see what Page Editor could really do. In doing my research I came across a lot of great posts that individually detail pieces of functionality, some of which I'd seen demonstrated at the last Symposium. Others go in depth to explain why certain choices are lend to a better framework. For this post, I wanted to weave together as much of a cohesive picture along with some commentary and lots of referential links for developers to see a fuller Page Editor experience.
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.
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.