There are lots of ways to add css classes to sites and I've covered how to setup stylesheets for multi-site installations, but if you're only building a single site on Sitecore and you're looking to quickly populate the class drop down, or any of the other rich text editor settings for that matter, then this is for you.
Many of the projects I've worked on over the past several years have required importing data either from SQL or from an existing Sitecore installation itself. The original application was a page form that imported data from a database and was developed by Mark Graber, Sitecore MVP and employee at Agency Oasis. Each time I've used it I improve on it and have since retooled it as an internal Sitecore application. I've recently cleaned it up to be a reusable, customizable application and am releasing it as a shared source module. You can find it on Sitecore Shared Source, or by getting the SVN repo at http://svn.sitecore.net/DataImporter. If you want to test it out you'll just need the package install. You'll also want to look over the documentation, which largely reiterates the information in this article.
I've long given up on using the User Manager paging buttons until yesterday when looking over the known issues, I found an article describing a solution to my problem on SDN. Knowing at least one other individual that has had the same issue I thought I'd do a write up to bring attention to it so that the anyone else with the same issue can get back use of their user manager.
*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 publishes anything all html cache for all sites defined under the web.config's "publish:end" or "publish:end:remote" event are cleared. Sitecore manages a lot more cache than just html cache so by their thinking when just the html cache is cleared, that is just part of all the cache they're working with. In this way they're right, but this strategy is a problem for my particular system because of the large number of sites and editors working on it at any given time. The continually growing number of sites means that I rely on the html cache a lot to minimize the workload on the servers and keep sites loading quickly. I had solved this same issue working with the Stager Module but doing it with this new system is a bit different. Before I go into details about how to do this I will say that I am expecting that you have already setup your system as a mutli-target platform and have properly configured your ScalabilitySettings.config file. If you're looking for more on how to setup a multi-target platform then I'd suggest first starting by reviewing the scaling guide on SDN first which answered all my question about how to get it working.
If you're on a Sitecore environment pre-6.3 and you're using the Sitecore Stager you may have noticed that each publish will clear the entire HTML for a site. This may be fine for you but I like to have more granular control over the cache so I've updated the source code a bit to clear only entries related to the published items. I'm not going to knock the Sitecore Stager, it's an excellent utility. Plus this why they release source code in the first place.
So while doing a dry run of an upgrade from Sitecore 6.2 to Sitecore 6.4, I noticed something that stopped working in my rich text editor: dynamic stylesheets. I have a large multi-site platform and it's using code from the dynamic stylesheets SDN Article to set a unique stylesheet in the wysiwyg editor for each site. The Telerik codebase has changed a bit and the rich text editor has also. So I'll go through what I did to get it working so you can shortcut the hassle. The first thing you'll need to know is that the file loading the rich text editor is now located at EditorPage.aspx instead of Default.aspx. The class supporting this page (Sitecore.Shell.Controls.RichTextEditor.EditorPage) is also different from it's predecessor (Sitecore.Shell.Controls.RADEditor.RADEditor). I've stubbed out the page directive you'll need to update below:
Some of the most useful features in Sitecore are also some of the least well known. The longer you work with anything, the more you begin to understand it. With something as complex as Sitecore you really have to spend a lot of time learning what it can do before you start to really see how well it's suited to solving a lot of different problems.
So I've recently spoken to some old colleagues about how they use SVN to release their site code and realized that there is still not a lot of common use of a release process. They suffer due to their time constraints since they've had little time to review and it can be daunting to take on the task of redefining a new aproach to this technology if you're really crunched for time. On the other hand, it can also be very nerve wracking when you're pushing code by updating a folder because if there's an issue a code roll-back is manual. I've been shown a solution to this challenge myself so I thought it would be good to put up an article giving an easy straight forward way for you to upgrade your approach without too much difficulty. If you can't retrofit your project in the way I'll show, you should be able to at least find another way once you understand the principles behind it.
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 original is in and you should be able to start working with it. You can get the files on the Cache Manager UI or checkout the source on Github.
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 the read and write methods for the videos and playlists. I ended up learning a lot and had started my own branch of the code. I named it Sukiyoshi, after my wife. I did a lot of work on Sitecore sites at the same time and after having built More Interop with Douglas Couto, which used a lot of video, I realized that being able to outsource the video management aspect of a Sitecore website could have greatly simplified our task.