Author: Anders Laub
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The Layer concept in Modular Architecture
Modular Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies used in Sitecore Habitat to showcase Sitecores recommended best practices for solution architecture in a Sitecore solution. This is my second post on Modular Architecture and Sitecore Habitat. If you haven’t read the first post already you can read it here. What are layers in Modular Architecture? The concept of…
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The groundbreaking Sitecore Habitat
Sitecore released a new demo site late September called Sitecore Habitat. There is nothing new in Sitecore supplying a demo site but this one is nothing less than groundbreaking, it is a real revolution in the way that Sitecore teaches developers to work with their product. In the latter days Sitecore would never explain how to structure…
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How to extend placeholders in Sitecore MVC
Wow it has been ages since I last wrote a blog post so it is about time that I get started again. A colleague of mine asked me a question the other day about how I would implement a page(experience)-editable accordion spot where each element in the accordion is a rendering item. Kind of like shown below…
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Gzip WebApi Response Content using an attribute
Today I was asked why json responses from WebApi was not being gzipped since it brought down our score on Google Page Speed. So yet again I started my ongoing fight with Google Page Speed. It turns out that we had issues making IIS gzip application/json data. Since we do not have direct access to…
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Comparing DI frameworks with Sitecore ReflectionUtil
As a follow up on my last post about IoC / DI containers and how to use the Sitecore API to perform inversion of control using ReflectionUtil, I’ve made a quick speed comparison of some common DI frameworks, Sitecores ReflectionUtil and the new keyword as the best case for how quick it is to instantiate…
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Simple IoC container using only the Sitecore API
Lately there has been a lot of discussions on twitter about using different third party frameworks for Inversion of Control using Dependency Injection in Sitecore solutions. The arguments in these discussions can be almost religious, either for or against using a specific third party IoC framework. There are two extremes, on one side the developers who…
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Working with custom MongoDB collections in Sitecore 8 using WebApi
The introduction of the xDB to the Sitecore eXperience Platform offer a ton of new options for us Sitecore developers. As a bonus we suddenly have a data store for anything at any time instead of either trying to make the data fit into Sitecore items or give up and go with a custom database. Now…
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Implementing a WebApi service using ServicesApiController in Sitecore 8
This will just be a quick post about implementing a WebApi controller in Sitecore 8 using the ServicesApiController class. Perhaps this post can help some of the teams in the ongoing Sitecore Hackathon, who knows. The ServicesApiController class Sitecore.Services introduce a new abstract class called ServicesApiController that derives from the System.Web.ApiController. The class itself only purpose is to identify…
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Securing the password recovery experience in Sitecore 8
Following my post on password recovery in Sitecore 8 fellow Sitecore MVP Kam Figy pointed out how the default Sitecore implementation potentially can be used by a malicious individual to block an editor from logging in by resetting their password automatically. This can be done simply by creating a script that request a new password for a known user…
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The amazing password recovery experience in Sitecore 8
Along with the new login screen in Sitecore 8 there is also a new implementation of password recovery for editors. In the old versions of Sitecore the /sitecore/login/default.aspx page redirected the user to a page called passwordrecovery.aspx. This page used an asp:PasswordRecovery asp.net standard webcontrol. Personally I never became fond of all of these standard but rather…
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Changing the image on the login screen in Sitecore 8
I really like the new login screen in Sitecore 8. The old one was also getting very old, except for some small makeovers especially from Sitecore 5.3 to 6 and the addition of a few new applications it has been almost completely static for more than 8 years. Once upon a time the login screen had…
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Extension methods for versioned layouts in Sitecore 8
Finally I am back blogging. The last 1½ month of my paternity leave and the first week of work did not go exactly as I had planned. Looking on the bright side I have learned a lot about how a baby’s immune system evolves. It goes something like this, baby gets a virus/bacteria, it incubates and…
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Add a SPEAK application to the Sitecore 8 Launchpad
My brain is currently in a complete amoeba state. This is my first blog post since I started my paternity leave some 4 weeks ago. I had been planning to write a post a day but I guess this is not really how taking care of a baby works. The Launch Pad was introduced in Sitecore 7.1…
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Generic extension methods for Sitecore ContentSearch
I would first like to mention that the code shown in this post is not originally mine. I’ve been using it quite often lately and made some tweaks to it which is why I think it deserves a quick blog post. Some of the code originate from my colleague Uli Weltersbach, he wrote a blog post on…
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UpdateHelper SaveInstallationMessages() removed in Sitecore 7.5
Sometimes we use the Sitecore class called UpdateHelper to install packages on different Sitecore instances for example via a webservice. Today I copied some code from a Sitecore 7.2 installation which did exactly this. It is a simple service class that installs a package from a path and then it logs the installation results as…
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How to create a custom cache in Sitecore
When coding a Sitecore solution you sometimes need a cache to store some values. I’ve seen a lot of different cache implementations in Sitecore solutions that do not use the Sitecore API. Such an implementation could for example use a static or perhaps a singleton some even go further and use a custom database or a nosql…
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Sending emails in Sitecore
Sometimes you need to send an email from your Sitecore code. I’ve seen a ton of solution implementations where the developer have written some custom class that sends out emails using a SMTP client, good old classic ASP.NET. I myself even wrote code for that in Sitecore solutions some years ago. That was before I noticed the…
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Matching Wildcards in Sitecore
While reading this nice blog post by my colleague Uli about resolving a Sitecore SiteContext from an URI I noticed that he used a regex to match a hostname using * as a wildcard That made me remember the Sitecore class called Sitecore.Text.WildcardParser. I once wrote a blog post about this class but I never got around to…
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Customizing Sitecore rich text field configuration
People often ask me questions on how to configure the Sitecore rich text editor in various ways. The Sitecore rich text editor is really easy to control and customize and there are already a lot of blog posts about it out there. Most of these posts only show how to create custom editor profiles and not how to…
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Sitecore SPEAK v1.2 goodies
This post show some of the new goodies we Sitecore developers get when working with Sitecore SPEAK 1.2 and Sitecore Rocks compared with the previous version of SPEAK. Strongly typed View Model In SPEAK 1.1 there was a lot of plumbing work you had to do almost all over the place. In your cshtml view you first…