Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Last week I started looking at some simple ideas for the top level navigation for Sitecore websites. This week, I'll continue that theme with some simple examples of the more localised navigation that you might use on content pages.
Most websites need some sort of navigation UI. If you have a site with more than a handful of pages then you're likely to need to create some components for rendering sets of links that show the structure of your site. So continuing my theme of simple patterns for Sitecore code, here is the first of a few posts on some approaches to navigation.
Ok, so it's technically Christmas and I should really be eating too many mince pies and watching repeats of early 80s sitcoms instead of blogging. But somehow I can't stop technology catching my eye.
It's not an uncommon requirement to have a control on your website which displays its data with varying styles in different locations in the site. Here are a few simple patterns for how you can create Sitecore UI components which can have their display style changed by location.
Quite often when you're putting together a website, you find yourself needing to link the current page to some sort of shared page for an action. "Click here to read terms and conditions" is a common example – where all your products need to be able to link to the Ts & Cs page.
A naive implementation might just hard code the path here, but that is inherently fragile. Renaming or moving the page can easily break your code. So what better approaches might you consider for meeting your requirement while allowing editors flexibility? Having talked about these patterns with colleagues a few times recently, I thought I'd write down some of the basics as a reference for future conversations.
I've written before about filtering data in Lucene searches if you're still using Sitecore 6.x. Having been doing more legacy work on this front over the last couple of weeks, I've got a couple of new things to add. Previously, the search work I'd been doing had relied on the default "relevance" sort order, or LINQ OrderBy clauses. However recently I've needed to enable some more complicated sorting, which has lead me to a few new (to me, at least) discoveries.
I had to deal with a bug report in some Sitecore 6.6 / Advanced Database Crawler search code recently, relating to items with publishing restrictions not disappearing from search results until another publish occurred. It struck me that there's not much written about how publishing restrictions interact with search, so I figured I should take a bit of time to write down what I'd found while sorting the bug.
It is quite possible that this issue is entirely down to some odd aspect of the setup of the Virtual Machine I'm developing on at the moment, but recently I've experienced quite a few hangs when loading Sitecore solutions. Starting up Visual Studio to be greeted with a never ending progress bar:
Continuing on from previous discussions about packages and their definitions, I found myself needing to quickly merge together the definitions of two different packages recently. And that sounded like an opportunity for a simple tool to add to my collection.
My work sometimes involves picking up projects that were started by other developers / agencies and making changes or enhancements. Sometimes the approaches used by the original developers can make these enhancements harder than they need to be. The HTML, CSS and Javascript of a recent project I worked on caused some issues that I thought were worth calling out to try and help developers do better work in the future.
