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I had a couple of hours today to play around with something and I had recently seen the news about public availability of the SQL Server on Linux preview... Short version - it seems to work with Sitecore....
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One of the SEO best practices everyone should trying to implement on their sites relates to URLs with spaces. I’m sure you’ve seen a URL with an encoded space before - %20. Yuck. Not only does it look bad to your site’s visitors, but search engines don...
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We just had a requirement come up on my current project where they wanted to restrict the number of sublayouts of a certain type on a specific page. They are using the unified page editor, so the thought was that when the "Select a Rendering"...
I got bit by a small gotchya while setting up a fresh Sitecore 7 install to use SOLR today. In SOLR, I left the core named the default "collection1" instead of renaming it to "itembuckets" as is recommended in the documentation. Well...
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Over the weekend, I posted part 1 of a discussion of this thing I created that I’m calling “conditional pages”. I promised to elaborate on the technical details, so here I am with some code samples and instructions that hopefully will allow others to reproduce what I have done....
A few days ago, I posed a question here (and on Twitter and on the SDN forum and some other places) regarding accessing visitor profile data from the HttpRequestBegin pipeline. I promised to post about why I needed to do that once I had everything working, so here’s the story. Sorry – it’s a bit of a long one. :)...
I have an HttpRequestBegin pipeline processor that runs right after the stock ItemResolver. I need for it to read a value from the current visitor's profile (or if a value isn't there, write one). Here's what my code looks like:...
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A while back, I wrote about opening Sitecore’s media library browser from a button in the Content Editor ribbon. Recently, I decided it would be really useful to do something similar with the Field Editor dialog – only this time, from the Page Editor...
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Something I have wanted to know how to do for years, but hadn’t bothered to put any thought into…  You know that “Folder” tab that appears in the content editor when you create a new folder (using the /Templates/Common/Folder template)?  Here...
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When I set out to create an easier way to set thumbnails in Sitecore, I had a picture in my mind of how I wanted it to work, but I didn’t really know where to start!  I hadn’t built a custom ribbon button before.  I hadn’t created a modal dialog...
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Once I discovered how helpful it was to present thumbnails to content authors in the Page Editor, I started adding them to all of the templates and renderings that I created.  Very quickly, I started to get frustrated with the process (see my part...
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With Sitecore 6.4 and 6.5, the new unified Page Editor is wonderful for giving content authors a friendlier experience and more control over their page layouts.  I was never a fan of the page designer in previous 6.x releases, so I was thrilled to...
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So the next release of EviBlog for Sitecore is going to be called WeBlog… The new trac page and SVN have been set up - you can see for yourself here http://trac.sitecore.net/WeBlog/

Being the curious soul that I am, I decided to grab the latest code from Subversion and try to get it running on the latest Sitecore 6.5.0 Update-1. The primary difficulty I had was the lack of an up-to-date package ZIP to get the items into a clean Sitecore database (the WeBlog-pre 2.0.0.zip in Subversion was pretty out of date). I powered through and I think I’ve found all of the Sitecore items that needed to be updated. WeBlog does appear to be working, at least. :)


Figure 1 - The WeBlog tab in the Page Editor ribbon

So what’s new? Hard for me to say because I actually haven’t kept up on EviBlog development… So some of these features may be new to me, but not new to WeBlog. The first thing I noticed is the integration with Sitecore’s page editor. There is now a “WeBlog” tab in the ribbon with icons for creating new blogs, creating categories within a blog, or posting a new blog entry (see Figure 1). I only tried this as an admin user, so I don’t know how the security is set up on these buttons - but I imagine it’s possible to hide the new blog button from non-admins. However, restricting who can post to an individual blog doesn’t appear to be included and seems like it would be rather complicated to implement using Sitecore security. Maybe WeBlog needs a field on the Blog template to let you specify a security Role allowed to create new entries and they could check that when the New Entry button is clicked?


Figure 2 - Administration component

The next new thing I noticed was an Administration component at the bottom of the right rail (Figure 2). This only appears while in Edit mode and currently only allows you to modify what theme the blog is using. I couldn’t get this to work at all (changing the value in the drop-down caused the page to post back, but the change wasn’t reflected and it wasn’t possible to click the Save icon in the ribbon). An admin function might be better implemented using an EditFrame with a button to open the field editor. It looks like they’re already doing this with the “Blog” button in the “Settings” chunk in the ribbon.

Speaking of themes, WeBlog comes with a few but they are all just color variations of the same basic theme. It would be nice to see how flexible the mark-up and styling is - hopefully someone good at CSS can produce a really different looking theme to show off the capabilities. As far as how themes are implemented, they appear to just be a Sitecore item with one field pointing to a .CSS file on disk.

Additional new features include CAPTCHA support (with a built-in option as well as reCAPTCHA), and AddThis support for Facebook like buttons, a Tweet button (along with a counter), and the usual AddThis drop down to support other sharing possibilities (I see a sublayout for ShareThis too, but don’t know what it takes to get it working or if it’s global or can be configured per-blog).

In this build, some things definitely don’t work the way I’d expect. When I add a new entry to my blog in page editor using the “New Entry” button in the ribbon, it prompts me for the name of the new entry, but then doesn’t navigate me to the entry so that I can edit it (I suspect this may be due to WeBlog using the NewsMover module to move it into a year/month folder structure maybe). Also, the new entry doesn’t show up in the list of entries on the blog’s main page when it re-loads. If I force a refresh, it shows up and I can click on it to get to the entry and edit it. I already mentioned the non-working Administration component. WeBlog is still pre-release software, so I can’t ask for much… I just wanted to check it out since it’s been a while. It looks really good and I can’t wait to try out the release - hopefully coming soon!

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For a while now, I’ve been primarily using Sitecore sublayouts as my rendering-of-choice. The suite of controls available are hard to resist, and it’s easier for someone that doesn’t know XSLT or Sitecore to modify the sublayouts (they’re just user controls...
It’s spring break and I wasn’t going to make any blog posts this week, but I just ran across this post ( http://www.markvanaalst.com/custom-field/using-jquery-in-custom-fields/ ) from Mark van Aalst concerning using jQuery in Sitecore’s content editor...
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