Inspecting Sitecore Packages Before You Install Them

March 14, 2011
Tags: Sitecore

So if you've worked with Sitecore for any length of time you've probably created your own data packages to move to a remote server or installed a module from Sitecore shared source. You may have wondered what you were installing out of curiosity or fear of blowing up your installation. It's also good to know all the files created or items that you'll need to publish. One way to go about  inspecting a package is to open it first in the package designer. First open the package designer:

open package designer

Then at the top if you click on the "New" text you'll see an option to open "From Existing":

from existing

You'll be give an dialog window to choose the packages uploaded to your site:

openPackage.jpg

Here I'll select the Sitemap XML module and we'll see the package elements:

package details

From the list on the left you can select the item and view the contents of that section like you would from a package you created yourself:

item detail

You don't want to edit the package at this point but this will help you a lot if you're recieving content from a third party vendor or other questionable source and you want to make sure you're not going to be overwriting a large swath of your content tree.