Skip to main content

Brian Beckham

As a Sitecore MVP, Brian spends most of his time consulting and architecting software solutions for enterprise-level Sitecore projects.

Blogs from this Author

Software Testing@1x.jpg

Unit Testing Custom Rules, Actions, and Conditions with FakeDb – Part 1 – Testing Conditions

Recently I was working on 2 new implementations of the Sitecore rules engine – adding new rule “types” that would be executed by an existing Sitecore pipeline. More news will come about those rules in the upcoming videos in BrainJocks SCORE University. We at BrainJocks are heavily vested in using Sitecore.FakeDb – so I decided […]

History Books@1x.jpg

MVT in MVC – A History Lesson

Multi-Variate Test has been a part of Sitecore DMS for quite some time. It basically allows marketers to vary a component’s datasource or a rendering itself and see which variation does better as measured in the overall engagement value. Testing is a big deal these days and Sitecore 8 attempts to disrupt the status-quo with […]

Taking Notes@1x.jpg

Sitecore 8. Developer’s Notes – Part 1

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]Unlike my usual blog posts where I pick a subject and dig deep, this one is a broad collection of notes that I’ve recorded since I started exploring Sitecore 8 and playing with SCORE and FakeDb in it. Like many Sitecore enthusiasts I just couldn’t help it and got my hands on it the […]

Support Tree@1x.jpg

Sitecore Support for MVC Areas

Multitenancy with MVC and Areas When developing for Sitecore, you must always be conscious of those “other” people … that is, other tenants. As mentioned countless times before, Sitecore offers support for multiple tenants from a single running instance, but it does not provide process or filesystem isolation for assets developed for each tenant website. […]

Assimetrical Wall@1x.jpg

Asymmetrical Placeholder Keys in Sitecore 7.5

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]UPDATE: Sitecore Support confirmed it’s a bug in the MVC pipelines in 7.5. If you are doing WebForms you should be fine with mixed case placeholder keys. There’s now a Sitecore.Support.424797.dll patch that replaces GetAllowedRenderings with a corrected version. I still believe proper fix belongs in the cache class itself – exposing the knowledge […]

Maze@1x.jpg

Sitecore MVC Item Maze

The Maze If you have worked with Sitecore MVC you have probably noticed a few (to say the least) .Item properties in various contexts: Model.Item (where Model is a RenderingModel) Model.PageItem Model.Rendering.Item (or RenderingContext.Current.Rendering.Item) Model.Rendering.RenderingItem RenderingContext.Current.ContextItem PageContext.Current.Item @Html.Sitecore().CurrentItem And of course a good old Context.Item is always available. A maze indeed. Intrigued? Need a map? […]

Fire Circle@1x.jpg

To The Controller And Back. Part 3 – DI and Multitenancy

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]A lot has been written on Dependency Injection with Sitecore. In this blog post I want to specifically focus on one important aspect – multitenancy – and look into how we can make our Dependency Injection multi-tenant friendly and as much native to Sitecore as possible.[/su_note] Multitenancy All good commercial grade CMS systems support […]

Circle From Above@1x.jpg

To The Controller And Back. Part 2 – Validation

In part 1 I looked at how Sitecore routes controllers that the forms POST to. Let’s see how you can go about validating your forms. I will show you traditional POST as well as AJAX forms with HTML fragments and JSON data. Test It Do you test your server side validation? How often did you […]

Round Stairs@1x.jpg

To The Controller And Back. Part 1 – Routing

Martina Welander has recently posted two great articles on POSTing forms with Sitecore MVC (part 1, part 2). I am very excited to see MVC in context of Sitecore being posted about more and more. Here at BrainJocks we fully embraced MVC since the day it came out officially supported in 6.6 and never looked […]

Love@1x.jpg

.update + .config = Love

There are multiple ways you can bring code and content into your Sitecore instance. Here at BrainJocks we are big fans of TDS, Git, cloud infrastructures, and Atlassian toolset – our local deployments are TDS-powered, our continuous build and deployment vehicle is Elastic Bamboo, and with little PowerShell, curl, and Sitecore.Ship we push code and […]

Hole@1x.jpg

Down The Sitecore Query Hole

I believe there is still use for the good old Query.SelectItems. You can do a lot with the content search API and you can do it a lot faster no doubt, but there are cases where you might still decide to use the good old Query. Anyway, even if only to have some fun exploring, […]

Abstract Code@1x.jpg

Sitecore Language Quirks

I am feeling good today and I invite you to read below and smile along with me. [su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]All tests pass as written on Sitecore 7.1 Update 1. Isolation provided by Sitecore.FakeDb[/su_note] The Stage There Is A Language With No Name A Language With No Name Has No Name Is There Really A Language With […]

Load More