Speak

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 even though it back then did not contain any applications. In Sitecore 7.5 the xFile application was added to the launch pad as the only application that shipped with Sitecore. ...

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 had to get the user control from the Sitecore Mvc RenderingModel. Then you could start building up your view by getting the rendering parameters from the model by calling various Get methods with loosely typed parameters. ...

Lately I’ve been asked a lot of questions on how to setup a project in Visual Studio for custom Sitecore SPEAK components. Here are some common issues and solutions. First issue - Creating the Visual Studio project with correct references First create a .NET 4.5.x C# ASP.NET Web Application in your Visual Studio solution. In this example I place the project in a folder structure, /components/domain, beneath a Sitecore webroot. ...

Following my blog post from earlier this week where I showed how to make SignalR work in Sitecore SPEAK, I thought of another solution to the same issue which is much more streamlined with SPEAK. The issue which I hacked my way through was that the RequireJS implementation in SPEAK requires that a JavaScript file ends with .js if it does not then .js will be added automatically. ...

Following this great post by my colleague Alan I came up with an idea on how to improve the SPEAK pipelines concept. The main problem with the pipelines as they are in Sitecore 7.1 is that there is no way to add or remove processors without making changes in JavaScript code. You can’t even change the order in which they are added without changing their priority in code (see Alan’s blog post). ...

The ListControl in SPEAK is made as a generic control for showing lists. Data is fed into the list using a datasource component as shown in my previous post here. In this post I will show how to define the columns in a ListControl and setup the rendering on a SPEAK page. It is kind of similar to how it was done in the “old” version of SPEAK which has been used for ECM 2 (as one of the only concepts which has been kept in the new version). ...

In SPEAK a list is fed with data through a data source. For example to get data into a ListControl the Items rendering parameter on the ListControl has to be bound to a collection on a datasource. When the items model attribute changes, that is when the datasource changes, then the ListControl automatically refreshes and shows the new data. SPEAK ships with 3 different data sources which are all made for Sitecore items. ...

During the Sitecore Hackathon we decided to implement a chat app for Sitecore editors so it is possible to send text messages to other online editors. To do this we wanted to use SignalR and SPEAK for the UI part. Setting up SignalR and creating the SPEAK layout was done quickly but it quickly became obvious that using the two together could be trickier than anticipated. The issue was not with SPEAK itself or SignalR but with RequireJS and the order in which Javascript is loaded. ...

After writing my previous post about Sitecore SPEAK rules magic I got really excited when I realized how extremely easy it is to add new actions and conditions to the SPEAK rules engine. So here goes. To make any real sense of this post I would suggest that you start reading from my first post about SPEAK if you haven’t read the previous posts already. ...

At this time of year everyone is speaking about Christmas magic, but today I will show you some SPEAK magic using rules. Following the example I gave in my last post where we made a text clickable and then changed the background color depending on the click, now let us make a rule which hides the control when count is equal to let say 22. Setting up the Sitecore SPEAK rule First we create a folder called Rules beneath the StartPage PageSettings item and in this folder we create a RuleDefinition item which we call HideControlRule. ...