Brian Beckham

This will be a really quick one. If you are using TDS and Sitecore 8 Update 3 that just came out yesterday you may see the following when building an .update package: Workaround Use Sitecore.Update.dll from Update 2 as a quick workaround. Solution Charlie Turano from Hedgehog TDS Support Team sent me the updated HedgehogDevelopment.SitecoreProject.PackageBuilder.exe.config […]

I was going to write this blog post for quite a while now. I’ve been exposed to the low level features of Sitecore on multiple occasions – building data providers, contributing to Sitecore.FakeDb, consulting project teams on various issues, and, of course, building SCORE. I believe that understanding fundamental concepts of Sitecore data architecture is […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I wasn’t going to write a part two when I published my original article on versioned layouts. Having worked with Sitecore 8 some more I now have more thoughts and notes to share. UPDATE: There’s now also part 3. You will not want to miss it![/su_note] Layout Delta We’ve had layout deltas since 6.4. […]

The SCORE team is busy working on v1.5 and the main theme for this release is Sitecore 8. Last week I was enabling (SPEAK-ifying) our Page Editor ribbon extensions and this post is a collection of thoughts and tips that I gathered along the way. Moving Parts [su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]There’s a lot of moving parts and […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I like Web Forms For Marketers. I thinks it’s a great module and definitely the first option to consider when implementing marketing forms on Sitecore.[/su_note] This rather short post is a collection of gotchas that I and the teams I work with came across when implementing WFFM with Sitecore MVC. Controller Rendering for GET […]

Rendering Model It’s very common to inherit your Sitecore MVC models from RenderingModel. The pipelines will call the Initialize() on it and you’ll get access to the rendering’s context item via Model.Item (read more about it here). It’s also not uncommon to reuse your rendering models as a submission container for a custom form in […]

Page Editor Ribbon Button In the old days of Sitecore 6.x and 7.x you might have extended the Content Editor and Page Editor ribbons to give your content editors and marketers an easy access to a great customization of yours. Maybe you built a dialog to expose page metadata. Maybe you built a copy language […]

In part 2 of this 3 part series, I will cover how to test a custom action using Sitecore FakeDb. When testing a custom action, you are testing that action alone – so I am not testing the rules engine itself, nor am I testing a specific condition (that was covered in part 1 of […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]In part 1 of this series we built a functional prototype of a dynamic product detail page. In part 2 we componentized it and learned to share product data with all components on the page. It’s now a fully functional solution but it’s not yet complete.[/su_note] Web Forms For Marketers It’s not uncommon to […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]In part 1 of this series we built a functional prototype of a dynamic product detail page. It’s an MVC route with a controller behind it that stages page context and kicks off rendering pipeline(s) for the product detail page template that is Page Editor editable. We did it this way and did not […]

Scenario Your Sitecore site needs to display product detail pages. Maybe it’s retail, maybe it’s e-commerce, maybe it’s a catalogue with (or without) online sample orders, maybe it’s an inventory listing with inquiry forms, maybe it’s something else. The detail pages may have same look and feel for all products, may vary per category or […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]Sitecore 8 comes loaded with new features. In this blog post I want to focus on Versioned Layouts. Please follow the link if you haven’t yet read about what it is and how it works. You will need some background knowledge to follow along. UPDATE: I have continued looking into versioned layouts and posted […]