With Sitecore 7, Sitecore has introduced some cool new features. The most interesting of them all (in my opinion) is the enhanced Search and the ability to write Linq statements for search queries. I have had the opportunity to design a site that uses Linq to Sitecore (Lucene). It definitely speeds up site performance but [...]
Sitecore 7, Linq to Sitecore Simplified Part 1
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Looking at the Forrest
On a current project I am scheduled to do training during development. As sprints come to an end and pass a light QA, the code is pushed to a staging server where the client will be trained. We use project management software and have a PM assigning tasks to the developers. Sublayouts, templates, and components [...]
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Who are you building this site for?
…An important question that isn’t asked often enough. Although it is something most CMS developers would say they know, I think it is worth repeating. When a Sitecore solution is developed, it needs to be done with 2 user groups in mind: The Content Editor / Manager and the End User. Building a website that [...]
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Placeholder’s in a Sitecore Multi-site Solution
No longer are the days of Sitecore where developers stack the presentation layer and that is the page the author writes content for. With the addition of the page editor, the content author can take on a much larger design role. One page type can now be stretched to create much more custom pages with [...]
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Template Source in a Sitecore Multi-site Solution
In general when creating a template and using fields like drop tree and tree list you want to limit the scope of the site to just the content tree for that site. In the Source field you would add something like /sitecore/content/mysite/ . The author would then have access to everything under the mysite tree. But what [...]
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Sitecore DMS – starting too fast or planning too much?
When clients start with Sitecore DMS, the first very important questions often are “What shall we do?” and “when shall we do it?”, which translates into “how much to we need to plan ahead before we can get the benefits of DMS?” Obviously there is no absolute correct answer to this question, but there are [...]
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Multi-variate testing – Sitecore DMS and beyond
Testing and optimizing your web site’s messaging and appearance is essential to your success and there are a large number of tools available for this purpose. When working with Sitecore DMS you furthermore have the ability to use Sitecore’s built-in multi-variate testing features as a very viable alternative. Note that the purpose of Sitecore DMS [...]
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SharePoint vs Sitecore as a CMS for a Public Facing Website
Let me preface this blog by saying I have done a fair amount of both administering and developing for SharePoint 2007 / 2010 and Sitecore versions 6.x – 7. In my experience, I have found that some IT professionals have a love affair with SharePoint. For this reason, they see SharePoint as something that can [...]
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Images in Sitecore and Responsive Design
Recently, I teamed up with a group of front end developers on a project to launch a fully responsive web site. Things were going smoothly until the content entry portion of the project started. I started to get ticket after ticket in my queue, “Matt can you go in and remove the inline height and [...]
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Why put a highly functional site in Sitecore?
In the past I have had many clients bring up the question of “Why should we put our highly functional site in Sitecore?”. As in the content of the site involves forms, developed conditional logic, and third part tools and services to make up the majority of what is displayed. At face value Sitecore is [...]
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Sitecore MVC and Duplicate Controller Names
Recently I started developing on a project that uses MVC in a multi-site environment. Since MVC is still fairly new to Sitecore there are a few details for us developers to experience and work out. We had created a controller which was referenced by its name in a Controller Rendering. This worked fine and everything [...]
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Indexing Custom Fields for Sitecore 7
First of all, I’d like to state that this is for Sitecore 7, it will not work for earlier versions. Furthermore, this post will cover both how to include a custom field in your index as well as exclude certain content from within that field. If you are looking to exclude content from the index [...]
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Creating a Mirrored SQL Environment for Sitecore 7
This is a step-by-step guide how to set SQL Mirroring for your Sitecore web site. Mirroring offers data redundancy and provides superior up-time by ensuring continuous data availability. This helps during upgrades, planned outages, and disasters… For this reason, it is often recoomened that your Mirror and Principal server not be located at the same [...]
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Deploying Sitecore on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Overview Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform (Sitecore) is an enterprise class web content management system that provides an elegant, integrated solution for content management for websites, engagement automation and analytics. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leader in reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. AWS offers an excellent platform for hosting and running Sitecore in [...]
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Increase your conversions by offering a personalized digital marketing experience to your suspects, prospects, leads and customers utilizing Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform.
Are your retail channels intelligent and profitable? Why do I care as an organization? The customer’s online shopping journey is evolving. Today’s consumers are looking for a more personalized online shopping experience that meets their specific needs and desires. Here are some of the benefits of adding personalization to your online marketing digital strategy. Better [...]
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Sitecore Presentation – Dynamically Changing Layout and Sublayouts
There are times when you need to temporarily change a Sitecore item’s layout. In our case, we had a multi-site solution which needed to have a fallback or standard presentation for cloned items that differs for each site. We decided, for each site, to have a settings/presentation node which would hold the presentation details that [...]
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Sitecore Sheer UI to SPEAK
Sitecore introduced SPEAK a while back. The main aim is to provide a robust framework that aids in rapid Sitecore module development. But does it really do that? Or was Sheer UI good enough? In my opinion, the only way we can answer that, is by developing the same module using both Sheer and SPEAK. [...]
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Deploying Sitecore on Microsoft Azure
Overview Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform (Sitecore) is an enterprise class web content management system that provides an elegant, integrated solution for content management for websites, engagement automation and analytics. Microsoft Azure is cloud computing platform and Infrastructure for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of managed data centers. This blog [...]
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XCentium launches Gigya-Sitecore Connector
XCentium today announced that it has launched the Gigya-Sitecore Connector. With the Gigya-Sitecore integration by XCentium, you can easily embed Gigya’s Social Login, RaaS (Registration-as-a-Service), Sharing, and Community Features throughout your Sitecore websites to facilitate deeper engagement and loyalty while collecting actionable consumer insights. Increased registrations with Social Login: Reduce the barrier to entry to [...]
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Use the Fully Qualified Name When Using a Sitecore MVC Controller – Sitecore Best Practice
The Best Practice for using a Sitecore MVC Controller is to use the Fully Qualified Name and Assembly for the Controller. Hopefully Sitecore will add this to the Sitecore MVC Developer’s Reference Guide (requires a SDN account). I started working with a new customer on a Sitecore 7.2 MVC project and they were trying to [...]
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