John West has been writing a few posts on Sitecore Idiosyncrasies over on the Sitecore site lately, and I have to highlight them and recommend them to all Sitecore developers. I have a number of coworkers with expansive CMS experience in systems other than Sitecore, and often times a large challenge to learning Sitecore is simply understanding the context of the terminology. John’s blogs should help clear up some confusing terms.
I think one of the most important of this series of posts is the Template post. I know this terminology gets a lot of people with knowledge of other CMS systems confused because they tend to think of “template” as a presentation term, but Sitecore uses it as a data structure that is completely independent from presentation.
I find the Installation Subdirectory post fascinating because I’ve always put my Sitecore site underneath the wwwroot directory in the physical file system. It has never really occurred to me to put it directly under inetpub instead. (This is probably because all the other websites I’ve ever worked on have their folders under wwwroot as well, so I don’t necessarily equate “wwwroot” with the default IIS Site at all.)
His posts are useful beyond simply learning terms and what they could apply to though. For instance, on his Web idiosyncrasies post, he describes renaming a config file to avoid a possible .NET conflicting error. Also, on the Media URL’s post he describes how to change the media items URL’s from having the “.ashx” extension. Most of the clients we work with prefer this change so that their media files are linked with their original extensions, so I would definitely recommend that for anyone working with newer IIS! One last item to note in that Media URL’s post: we recently ran into the “too deep a media library structure” issue with one of our clients, so that last piece is certainly worth paying attention to. It’s a problem that can jump out at you from nowhere, and it’s good to know ways to combat it!
Overall, I would highly suggest reading all the Idiosyncrasies posts out there right now, and if John continues to post more those as well!
