Project Lifecycle

So if you've ever setup caching on a Sitecore site you'd be familiar with the admin cache page. I recently had to set it up on a fairly large existing site and though there were a lot of other issues, one was that I was overwhelmed by the length of the list I had to view to get the information I needed. So I spent a little time and built a new admin cache page so that I could search just for what I wanted and clear out the excess noise. I built it to be a drop in place setup so that there are no external libraries or files. You can literally just copy these files into the same folder the origi

update on 9.13.2011 - Sukiyoshi's open source license has changed to the MIT open source license.

update on 3.8.2012 - Sukiyoshi has been updated to work on Sitecore 6.4 and up and has a specific release for it you can jump over to the Sukiyoshi open source repository for the specifics.

Over the past few years I've been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to work with Brightcove and was given a development account for their platform that I could work against. In that time I went and took the existing .NET SDK Tanaris that had implemented the video read methods and blew out the rest of th

While doing research for another article I came across an article on Stack Overflow asking about Rich Text Editor Profiles. The author noted that nothing had been written on the topic so I thought I might go ahead and fill in the blank. So to start from the top for anyone new to Sitecore, when you're creating fields on a template you select a Rich Text Editor as a field type. This will allow content editors to use the Telerik wysiwyg editor when they click to edit that field. If you use the stock Rich Text Editor field you'll notice that there are very few buttons to use and might wonder why i

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:

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

You'll be give an d

When it comes to working with .NET on the web you have a lot of flexibility on how you approach a project. One particular aspect which seems to be a constant point of contention is the differences between Visual Studio's Website (WS) and Visual Studio's Web Application project (WAP). I had to work with both and over a long time and lot of arguments I learned quite a bit about the differences. Almost anyone who has written an article about this will tell you that you can accomplish pretty much any task with either approach and that choosing one over the other really comes down to your preferenc

While developing with Sitecore you'll probably end up using XPath query to return some results. Since a lot of people will be requiring you to create content items with dashes in the name, for SEO purposes, you're going to need to escape the dashes with "#" (pound) signs as detailed in this SDN Sitecore Query Syntax article. This means you'll need a method to clean your XPath queries. Having done this a few times and integrated mine with other developers versions, here's what I've come up with:

public static class StringExtensions {
	public static string CleanXPath(this string s) {

		string sc