Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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.
NB: This post was written about Sitecore V6.6 – if you're using Sitecore 7.5 you should look at the updated version instead.
Ever gone through the steps to create a new Application in the Sitecore "Start Menu", but had it not appear despite refreshing? I wasted an hour of my afternoon scratching my head over this issue recently, so I thought I would write down what I went through in case anyone else hits the same issue...
A bit of a change of tack this week. Rather than writing about something I've been doing, I'd like to ask for your ideas on something I've been thinking about. This issue is way to complex to compress into a tweet to ask on Twitter, and it seems too opinion based to be asked on Stack Overflow. So I'll ask it here, in the hope that some of you clever people might offer your opinions. Comment below, tweet me, write blog posts in response, send carrier pigeons or whatever. All thoughts appreciated...
So here's what I'm thinking about: How do you set up your projects for development?
