It's been a while since I've updated the Caching Manager, which is a module on the Sitecore Marketplace, so during a recent upgrade it was about that time. I'm using the design from Sitecore 8. It's backwards compatible through Sitecore 6 (SIM makes this possible) so there's no excuse for not getting it. Unless, you're on 5? Was caching on 5? I honestly don't remember or probably never knew.
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.
On a recent project I was looking to replace some existing infrastructure that built a sidebar on a page using a list of content items (non-page items) that were selected by the content editor. The existing system was using a single sublayout which had several templated server controls that defined the display for different types of content. This was a global resource and any individual site that wanted to modify the display would have to copy the file in it's entirety even if it only wanted to modify a single line. It also didn't provide a default display for items that weren't explicitly defined. Only predefined types were displayed so there was some confusion as to why some things wouldn't be displayed.
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.
*(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'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.
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 handles the comparisons. It's not something that's entirely common but occassionally you need to know how to deal with the layouts programmatically. Hopefully someone else will find it useful too.