Back-End Development

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]A colleague of mine – Maryna Veller – has discovered and diagnosed a very interesting issue with Sitecore’s language resolution on Windows 10. This blog post is the result of her findings[/su_note] Sunny Morning You have a site. Perfectly architected, beautifully built, working like a well oiled machine on Sitecore 8 and Windows 8. […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I am not an operations guy but often my Sitecore backups needs are not sky high either. Maybe you are running a QA environment that your client starts using to play with content population. While that content is not exactly real they would prefer that the content doesn’t vanish overnight. Or maybe there’s a […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I recently had to import various data sets as items into Sitecore. There are many tools one can use but I wanted something very simple, something readily available, and yet something powerful and flexible enough to build a reusable component. I figured I would use Sitecore Powershell Extensions.[/su_note] For a treasure hunt we need […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I have recently found myself working on a project that needed federated authentication. While intrAnet sites could use SiteMinder agent, extranet sites could only do SAML via something like Shibboleth. Setting up a Service Provider with Shibboleth is fairly straightforward and well documented on their wiki. And it also works like a charm until […]

Attribute Routing Rumor has it: you can use MVC attribute routing in Sitecore. It’s actually very easy to set up. John West posted it recently on his blog. Today I stumbled upon an interesting side effect of using this way of routes registration that may be important if your controllers generate user facing experiences that […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]This blog post is a response to a question over at SDN (here). It’s a prototype of a solution, please use at your own risk and make sure you harden the code properly. I intentionally simplified it for the blog post. If I spend a little more time on it I will publish it […]

I assume you have read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series so I won’t explain versioned layouts feature. I will only say that out of the box Experience Editor can only edit Final layout. To modify Shared portion of the presentation details you need Device Editor: Or you can edit the field value […]

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 […]