Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
As someone famous** once said, with great power comes great responsibility – and the power of Sitecore's component-based page model puts a lot of responsibility on us developers to create a structure for component data sources that makes sense to content editors. The two most common patterns I find myself using are that of having a "shared content" folder somewhere in the content tree which reusable DataSource items live in, and having items as children of the component's page. When using the "shared content" folder you can easily set the DataSource Location field for your UI component to point to location where all the relevant data gets filed, but you can't easily do that if you want to have your DataSource items as children of the page. So you tend to end up leaving the DataSource Location field blank to allow the user to pick the current page as the place to create the new item.
Be honest people: how many of you have wasted a few hours of your life by accidentally clicking "Revert Database" when you meant to click "Update Database" after a long evening at the development coal face? I certainly have. And if you're like me and tend to serialise only the things you've changed in your project, then that means you generally end up with a dead instance of Sitecore.
This blog is a challenge to myself to try and write something technical once a week for a year.
