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 override the actual editor configuration. I guess everyone knows how to create custom rich text editor profiles by now so this is not what I want to show. If this is what your are looking for then just ask google. ...

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. ...

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 example see the tutorial code from Glass Sitecore Mapper here the Global.asax is used to set the glass context on the Application_Start event. ...

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 mastering the art of explaining in text so I will try to make it as short and concise as possible. Green text comes from a ”Page 1” and gray text is related content inserted from ”Page 2” . So on “Page 1” we will not have to have a RTE field, then a related content selector and another RTE field. There will be just one RTE field. ...

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 times before (or so it feels) and depending on the version, build environment etc. I’ve used a number of different approaches. The approach we used today was extremely effective so I thought that it deserves a blog post. ...

I am writing this post because I was one day confronted with the situation when I had to move a whole bunch of HTTP Services to be called via Azure API Management. These services were serving mobile calls from both iOS and Android devices. All nice and well but the problem I got was that some of these services should have their response cached for a period of time so that the apps would not call them every single time. The API management does indeed provide some settings to set caching but for some reason whenever the apps would call any of the cached services the “Cache-Control” header was always set to private instead of public as it was desired ( here is some interesting reading about Cache-control headers ). ...

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 not “draw” the Exif information from the JPEG image onto the new Bitmap. ...

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 parameters. The concept is basically that you call the media handler with specific querystring parameters that will make Sitecore center-crop the image. Similar to the out-of-the-box Sitecore image parameters. ...

When implementing a responsive design the size of images is almost always an issue. You want the images to be resized server-side so they fit the screen. Primarily for performance but also to please Google Page Speed. Sitecore enables us to set the width and height dynamically by sending query parameters to the media handler. My colleague Brian wrote this nice post where he explains the basic out-of-the-box Sitecore image parameters. ...