Friends, romans, countrymen... et al, the Setting Up a Sitecore Extranet article I wrote in 2011 is one of my most trafficked. It occurred that many of you could benefit from the additional changes that I've made since then, so that those who are setting up your own system by hand could now benefit from a module that manages most of the process for you. For visual reference, I've made a video for a quick intro to the module.
There already exists an extranet module on the Sitecore Marketplace but I'm not the developer of it. Sitecore is. The documentation says it was created in 2007 for Sitecore 5.3. I've never used it so I can't speak to its efficacy. I'm presenting my own solution and you're free to choose which will work best for you.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Data Importer is a Sitecore module on the Sitecore Marketplace. It's a tool that allows you to import data into Sitecore. It was originally built to import sites from existing websites by pulling from databases and into content items. It allows you the flexibility to handle each individual field in a row of data using a number of built-in conversion types but also allows you to extend the system by creating your own providers for data sources and adding your own field conversion types.
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.
I began working with web testing years ago with the MS Test framework when I got a version of Visual Studio that allowed it's use. I started small and began building simple ping tests. Over time it developed into a tool would run sets of tests daily and fed the results into a blog that I could read every morning. It tought me a lot but eventually I hit too many limitations. License cost being the most obvious but also I couldn't create a custom interface for it. I had to work within Visual Studio and the UI was too blunt. This forced me to finally bite the bullet and start converting my system to NUnit and Watin.
I've finally come full circle. I initially intended to write about a pre-existing wizard that I rebuilt before I found out about xaml controls. Ignore the irony about writing a series on using xaml controls and giving the final how-to article using the old controls but I did build the wizard(s) before I discovered the system; so there's that. Also, as I mentioned at the end of the first article, there's a sample tutorial wizard provided by Sitecore, built using the new xaml controls which can be used if you're up to converting it.
The previous articles explained what Sheer UI was and how to do basic integrations into your system but what else can it do? There's a good deal of syntax that is supported and a number of useful controls at your disposal.
With the previous article explaining a bit about what Sheer UI is, setting up a hello world will make much more sense. For this, I'm going to setup the XML control and supporting class file and then give examples of calling them from Applications and Item Editor Tabs
My journey began with a rebuild of a Sheer UI Wizard. I didn't build it, but I was about to learn to. After finding a dearth of literature on Sheer and realizing the documentation was a little out of date (I'm guessing SC 4), I knew I was going to write something on it. When I began writing I thought I knew a fair amount about Sheer from my experience creating different utilities but as it turns out, I knew very little. Though, from some of the applications I've seen, there seems to be a few who have faced the abyss and become steely Sheer developers, I'm betting there are more like myself with passable knowledge but not the whole picture. There was a recently released video walkthrough from the 24 hours of Sitecore led by Robert Hock that details setting up a Sheer UI application that's also worth watching and a video of the presentation I gave to the Sitecore User Group.
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.
Placeholder settings are used to create predefined insert options for components (sublayouts, renderings and web controls). You have two basic approaches to use: setting the placeholder key on the item's Placeholder Key field:
or setting the key when you apply it to an item through it's presentation details.