Project Lifecycle

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.

I'd also like to preface this article by saying that one of the driving forces behind much of the change in Sitecore 7 is an increasing need to support large data sets. And don't dismiss this release thinking that there isn't a lot of value if you're system isn't that large. You don't

I recently had a request to detect the browser language for a multilingual site I support. Now this certainly isn't anything new and here's the canonical/obligatory John West post written about it. I'm not trying to rewrite what he's done. My solution is different and deals with different needs. The requirements I had were:

*set the context language to the browser language if the site has item versions in that language*if the user changes the language through a dropdown selector maintain the new language settings

These seemingly innocuous requirements add more complexity than you'd expect. The c

This article details how to add fields to the Link Database, how Sitecore uses the FieldTypes.config to add items to the Link Database, issues with the DelimitedField type and how to create your own custom type to use in the FieldTypes.config.

Adding Fields to the Link Database

Setting up new or custom fields is pretty straight forward. In my initial research I found this article by John West to be quite helpful. There's two parts to getting a field setup with the link db: setting up the config entries and rebuilding the link db. You can add entries to the FieldTypes.config file or your own cu

*Update 2

I also found that there was an issue with the <using> statements as well that required an attribute to be added. When I opened the Configure-Assign (Insert Options) or tried to add from template, I would get the following exception:

The type or namespace name 'EventArgs' could not be found.

Once I added an arbitrary attribute to the <using> tag it was fine.

*Update 1

So Sitecore Support got back to me pretty quickly and told me that if I just add an attribute that makes the reference unique that's how to solve the issue. Here's the relevant code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmln

Since there were some significant changes in Sitecore's RTE when they upgraded to Telerik's new libraries from Sitecore 6.3 to 6.4. I'd written previously about adding buttons to the RTE before and was lookin for a good reason to write a supplemental article. Thankfully the new editor actually simplifies a bit of what you'll need to do from the earlier version of Sitecore.

I was recently asked by a content editor how to insert a YouTube video on a page in Sitecore and after thinking about the best approach to respond with my options were to tell the user to change to HTML mode in the Rich Text E

*the code was updated 8/2/2011 with some insight from Mrunal Brahmbhatt. Much appreciated.

 So I recently upgraded my system to Sitecore 6.4 from Sitecore 6.2 and was pumped about a lot of the new features like multi-browser support, new Rich Text Editor but mostly, the new built-in multi-target cache management system. Now I have to say that when I heard the words "partial cache clearing" I completely misunderstood what it meant. I thought it was partial html cache clearing thinking that when a single page got published, just that item was removed from cache. The truth is that when anyone publ

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

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

updated on 8/11/2011 regarding the order of the tabs. specifically to the position of the content tab .

So during the course of developing websites for Sitecore there are a lot of opportunities to create custom functionality. One feature that I like to use is a custom editor tab. If you're unfamiliar with the concept then you've seen them and just didn't notice. If you have a media folder selected you'll see options to "upload" or "upload advanced".

This is a custom editor tab. Sitecore provides this one out of the box along with many others but occasionally you'll find it advantageous to create

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 hand

Recently I was required to take over the hosting of our SVN server and had the opportunity to take the existing system, which was a good base, and rebuild some parts of the it to meet some of our evolving business needs. I spent a lot of time reading about all the features of SVN and other version control systems as well as testing and redesigning it until I found the right balance of structure and security. I hope that what I learned as a result will help you as a web developer know what you can do with your repository and hopefully take some of the strain out of managing your environment. I