During my work at Pentia I often perform health checks of existing Sitecore solutions built by other Sitecore partners. The solutions vary a lot in both quality and age but there are a few things which I need to point out as missing in each and every report. It is like it is secret Sitecore features only known by a small group of privileged developers even though it is so extremely basic. ...
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. ...
This post is the fourth and final in a series about Sitecore SPEAK components. Now we have seen how a SPEAK component is built in part 1, 2, and 3. In this post I will show a full example of a really simple custom control. Why create a Custom SPEAK component anyway? Sitecore delivers 70++ SPEAK controls and components which should cover most needs, but in some cases you might want something completely domain specific in your SPEAK application which cannot be achieved with the standard controls. ...
This post is the third in a series about Sitecore SPEAK components. A SPEAK control rendering can be implemented in two ways. Simple approach, the control consists of a Razor view, a Javascript file and potentially some styling. Advanced approach, consist of the same as the simple approach with two C# classes and some extension method added. If databound properties are inherited from a base component then using the Advanced Approach can save some plumbing code. But this is also at the cost of lower flexibility and readability. ...
This post is part 2 in a series showing how to create custom Sitecore SPEAK components. In this post I will show how to setup a custom SPEAK component in Sitecore. It is actually just setting up a rendering in Sitecore and then creating a rendering parameters template for it which is actually just a template item residing beneath the rendering item. Registering a SPEAK component in Sitecore To do this we do not need to enter Sitecore at all, what we need to do is to use Sitecore Rocks as mentioned in part 1. To make it even more easy then scope the Sitecore Explorer to the core database in which you want to register the control. ...
This post is part 1 in a series showing how to create custom Sitecore SPEAK components. It is time for Sitecore developers to learn Javascript and become all around web developers not just hiding back in the save haven of the server. Like it or not this is the way things are going. Looking on the bright side with todays frontend technologies it is almost the same to work on the client as on the server. ...
The silence is broken, this is my first blog post for the last 3 weeks time since I’ve been renovating my apartment. But now I’m back first with this small information post. I was installing a clean Sitecore 7 with ECM 2.1 and design importer 2.0 for Sitecore 7 yesterday. The design importer was working fine in the content editor but when trying to create a new message in ECM I received the following exception. ...
For all you that will use Lucene 3.0 under Sitecore 7 and want to highlight your results using Luce.Net.Contrib libraries, let me save you a whole lot of time. On Lucene.net page http://lucenenet.apache.org/ you will find a reference to the above mentioned package which i used for retrieving highlighted results from my Lucene index. All nice and smooth until i performed the search and stuck with this error for 3 days: ...
Some times you’ll come across some code which relies on reading the Sitecore.Context.Item and there is no way for you to change this. This can occur when calling some standard Sitecore pipelines, some custom code which has been inherited without the source etc. Well, Sitecore API to the rescue. Introducing the ContextItemSwitcher I am not sure how long this has been a part of the Sitecore API, but at least since 6.4 where I first noticed it. ...