A question popped up on Sitecore StackExchange asking how to remove the default items when installing using SIM. As we all know, Sitecore installs some sample items and provides the “lady with the phone” sample homepage. Normally I just ignore them, the items will be there in the deployed solution but since they are not referenced anywhere we don’t really care.

Anyway, there are no steps in SIM to clean the default items from the install of Sitecore. I’ve previously blogged about running scripts using PowerShell and TDS Post Deploy actions, but that requires SPE to be installed and the scripts to be deployed but TDS generates .update packages so that would be no good to install with SIM. However Sitecore packages themselves can contain Post Install Steps, they are not TDS specific – post install steps are used as part of the upgrade process or when installing packages such as WebForms For Marketers for example.

So why not create a custom package with a Post InstallStep to delete the default (or any) items?

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