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 After finding a dearth of literature on Sheer and realizing the documentation was a little out of date (I'm guessing SC 4), I knew I was going to write something on it.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.
After you've decided what components your pages will be broken up into and created the sublayouts (renderings or server controls) each extending your base class, you can begin working on the setup inside Sitecore by configuring your component item's fields and setting up component insert options. These settings are stored on the sublayout items themselves and I'll detail them here.
As a shout out, this series started because I was recently speaking with Mark Ursino and he gave me a demonstration of a recent build where he had taken advantage of a few really slick features in Page Editor. I decided to do some research to see what Page Editor could really do. In doing my research I came across a lot of great posts that individually detail pieces of functionality, some of which I'd seen demonstrated at the last Symposium. Others go in depth to explain why certain choices are lend to a better framework. For this post, I wanted to weave together as much of a cohesive picture along with some commentary and lots of referential links for developers to see a fuller Page Editor experience.
As a follow up to my Sitecore Util Classes post, I randomly did a search through the Sitecore 6.4.1 kernel for Manager and Helper classes and as it turns out this time I hit a gold mine. Like my previous article I'll only touch on them briefly because there's just too many to go into any real depth but I wanted to at least put it out on the internets to raise a little awareness on these hidden gems in Sitecore. I left out any Interfaces, Abstract classes or classes without any public methods. In total I found 55 manager classes and 15 helper classes.
In a recent Sitecore build I had to store the pages that a user saved as a "Favorite" throughout the site. The site was an intranet so everyone had a user within Sitecore, which helped. The next question was where to store the information. I wanted it to be stored along with local user data but wasn't sure if I was going to need to extend the user object and create extra fields or if I could leverage the existing structure. I ended up looking through a lot of the user properties and scouring the cookbooks and eventually I found what I was looking for in the security api cookbook: Custom Properties.
I've been using the FieldSuite, which was built by Sitecore MVP, superhero and all around good guy, Tim Braga, for about 8 months now and have come to really like a lot of its featues but there was one field that I hadn't used: The "Field Suite Images Field". When I thought I'd finally look into it, the documentation had a few details about customizing the control but not about using the field which gave me the opportunity to do a quick write-up. So first I tinkered with it until I figured out how to get it working and then figured it would be a good idea to write up a quick post about it.
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.