Dylan McCurry – Solutions Architect

Valdis Iljuconoks previously helped me understand how to effectively implement AllowedTypes restrictions with interfaces, something like  [AllowedTypes(typeof(INestedContent))]– which is a beautiful solution for building a block library. This makes our blocks and their Content Areas only concern themselves with specific interfaces. In our case, we usually have layers such as IPageContent (for stripes, grid structures, […]

Starting a new language version in Sitecore doesn’t have to be painful. Sitecore Powershell Extensions can enable your team to copy and manipulate languages in bulk with ease. It’s a favorite of every content team I’ve had.

Episerver Find is a great and easy way to integrate search into your Episerver powered website.  One often overlooked aspect, however, is keeping your search indexes lean.  By default, Episerver will index all instances of content across your website, whether it’s Pages, Blocks, Media, or Folders- Find doesn’t care and will index all of it.  […]

When building highly performant web applications, it’s always important to consider your caching strategy.  There are some generic things you can do to make your overall website faster (such as setting efficient client-side cache policies), but often times a much overlooked performance pitfall involves making too many API calls.  Luckily, Episerver’s Object Caching can help […]

While developing new features in Episerver CMS, it can be incredibly useful to have a local copy of the production content.  Here are the steps required for extracting content from Episerver’s DXP platform and restoring it into your local environment for development. Step 1: Request a database backup from the PaaS portal The first step […]

In modern day CMS systems we rarely create pages that have fixed layouts with zero flexibility.  Often times we give the marketing team the power to define experiences by placing a number of configurable components on the page in the layout that they see fit.  This is empowering, but can also be intimidating if you’re […]

Often times when building content models inside of a CMS, it’s important to consider the various types of editors and the permissions they may have within the eco-system.  One technique that I find highly effective is to limit the amount of fields a user may see based on their CMS role.  Removing non-essential fields from […]

While iterating on projects it’s always a good idea to keep your lower environments in sync with the latest content and imagery from your production environment.  In some platforms this is a significant effort, but with Episerver DXP it can be easily automated! Eric Markson from Perficient recently blogged about how to automate the orchestration […]

Lazy loading images is a technique for modern web developers where you instruct the client’s browser to only download images as they are needed.  This leads to tremendous performance improvements, as client devices do not waste bandwidth downloading assets which are not being rendered.  To achieve this, we’ll use some client side mechanisms from css-tricks.com […]

Last week I received a nasty bug report regarding Accessibility and Episerver.  Within Rich Text areas in Episerver, the file name is injected by default for alternate text.  This hurts your accessibility score and is a detrimental impact to visually impaired users.  Coincidentally, others in the community have written about and questioned how to solve […]

When chasing down performance problems on a website, you’ll often times hit an error around deferring offscreen images.  This warning occurs when you have imagery “below the fold” (e.g., the area you must scroll to see) loading on your webpages. This problem is especially rampant in CMS systems where you’re never quite sure what the […]

SCORE for Episerver – New Image Crop Tool Responsive Web Design (RWD) offers a cost-effective, high quality and easily managed delivery of content to a variety of devices. Many teams build sites in RWD by using custom or popular responsive frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap or Foundation Zurb. But how can we combine the responsive design […]