Brian Beckham

Remote Events Remote events have been part of Sitecore for quite a while. There are built-in events and you can also trigger your own. You queue them up on your CM instance and then receive and re-raise them on the other end of the tunnel – on all your CD instances. I won’t go into […]

A few months ago I blogged about helping TDS clean up after file replacement. Today I learned that TDS needs some more help and decided to give it a hand. Built Files When TDS builds your TDS.Master project it goes through various steps to copy your solution files, do file replacements, perform XML config transforms, […]

Chromes Sitecore uses special markers – chromes – to tell apart placeholders, renderings, fields, and edit frames in the Page Editor. A chrome is server-generated and marks the beginning and the end of a potentially editable section. It also provides all the essential metadata for the client side scripts to rely on: The metadata for […]

What do you do when you need extra resources (JavaScript, CSS) brought into your Content Editor and Page Editor experience? Maybe you have developed a custom field type that requires Google Maps API. Maybe many of your renderings use an external library or a client side helper of your own when in IsPageEditorEditing(). Whatever the […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]Now available in the Sitecore Marketplace[/su_note] This will be the last post in the series about creating a custom field type with support for Content and Page Editor (see part1, part2, and part3) Basics There are two main pieces to an XML control: Markup. It will be a simplification but think of it as […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]Now available in the Sitecore Marketplace[/su_note] In part 1 I mentioned the requirements for our custom field to become a law abiding Sitecore citizen. In part 2 I built a complete prototype of the YouTube video picker dialog that we will later convert to the XML control. It’s time to apply for passport. TL;DR […]

GeoIP GeoIP via MaxMind is a great feature of Sitecore Analytics. Everything is built-in and all you need to do is inspect various attributes of the VisitorDataSet.VisitsRow, such as Region, Country, City, MetroCode, etc. Here’s how it works (simplified, of course). Sitecore runs UpdateGeoIpData as part of two Analytics pipelines: and In the Sitecore MVC […]

I will take another break from the series about YouTube Video Picker Field (part 1, part 2) to talk some more about Layout Details. I briefly mentioned it when I blogged about cascading MVC renderings and now I want to dig in deeper. Solid The dehydrated state of Layout Details (a.k.a Presentation Details, a.k.a __Rendering) […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]Now available in the Sitecore Marketplace[/su_note] In part 1 I set to implement a custom field type for Sitecore that would seamlessly support both Content and Page Editor and would provide an interactive “picker” experience for selecting the value. In this part I will show you a working HTML prototoype of the picker dialog. […]

I will make a short break in my series about YouTube Video Picker. This one is worth it. MVC Pipelines You have probably seen Alex Shyba’s post on how to cascade renderings in Sitecore 6.5. It’s a neat solution with a little twist to the insertRenderings pipeline (called as part of renderLayout). It’s great but […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]Now available in the Sitecore Marketplace[/su_note] Intro Here at BrainJocks we have recently built two custom field types for Sitecore – Geo Location and YouTube Video. Both fields are “picker” fields with custom controls for Content Editor and Page Editor. Sitecore Marketplace has a few relevant downloads (at least for the location picker) but […]

A Tale Of Three Friends Once upon a time there lived three friends – Copy, Clone, and Duplicate. Copy and Duplicate were almost identical twins but they didn’t get along very well. Duplicate was lazy and everything he could delegate he would ask Copy to do. Copy has always been a good guy and would […]