Why: adverb; for what reason or purpose.
It may come as a surprise to some of you that I'm not an Automata. Surprise! I'm a human being. Unlike a robot or even a cyborg, I can't instantaneously learn Kung-Fu by downloading it. It takes time to accumulate knowledge and experience. I have to read, try and sometimes fail before I learn about something but eventually with persistence, I get there.
I'm quite literally, so furiously, thinking of ways to explain the funky stuff inside my brain. I couldn't explain! You might understand though. In fact, I'd wager you will.
I'm now watching mountains drift beneath the wing of my plane (sunglasses on). I'm leaving Las Vegas richer not poorer. You could say, I've just had quite an amazing Sitecore Experience (wink).
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)
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.