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 […]
Sitecore 7.5 Analytics templates bug
Found an interesting bug today in a Sitecore 7.5 installation and I think it is worth sharing. I have to mention that Sitecore Support has been notified and they are working on an official fix. I have noticed this issue after I upgraded from version 7.2 but also on clean installations. If you navigate to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Setting up a Sitecore SPEAK project in Visual Studio
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 […]
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 […]