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 […]
Sitecore
Sitecore 7.5 Analytics and user manipulation in Engagement plans
I have recently had the interesting and challenging task of upgrading a Sitecore 7.2 installation to the newest Sitecore 7.5. In the project we were extensively using Analytics code which had to be updated. That is where the fun began. In our solution we had to manipulate users in engagement plans. Users had to be added, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Global.asax events and Sitecore pipelines
At Pentia we always try not to change any files that ships in an out-of-the-box Sitecore installation. This makes upgrading easier and the solution code more transparent for developers. Sitecore ships with a standard Global.asax file and a lot of Sitecore developers choose to make changes directly in this to hook into application and session level events. For […]
Insert Sitecore related content directly into the RTE
What I want to achieve with this post is give the editors the possibility of inserting related content from other pages into their current Rich Text Editor. They could insert related content from some selected fields in another pages or render some spots so that they would present a page somewhat like this : I am still working on […]
A quick tip on upgrading Sitecore fast and easy
Today my colleague @alinulms and I had the “fun” task of updating an old Sitecore 6.5 to version 7.2. Actually we really want to upgrade the solution to Sitecore 7.5 but we are still waiting for Sitecore. I really hope 7.5 will be officially released any time real soon. I’ve upgraded Sitecore installations at least a trillion […]
An involuntary lossless image compression by Sitecore
This is a small bonus post following my post series about responsive images in Sitecore. When you load a JPEG image in .NET into a Bitmap and then draw it on another Bitmap then you will notice that the original image is sometimes bigger than the new one. How can that be.. This is because .NET does […]
Make Sitecore deliver images which fits the screen, part 2
This is the second part of a mini-series where I show how you can make Sitecore deliver images that fully support a responsive web design. See the first post here if you haven’t read it already. In this part I will show how to make Sitecore center-crop images through the media handler using query string […]