jammykam

Mass Creating Users with SiteCore PowerShell Extensions

Have you ever had to create a lot of users in Sitecore? Maybe you are setting up a new Content Management server and the users will be managed in Sitecore and you have to set up all the new users? Or maybe you need to create a whole bunch of users for the testers to be able to check different types of functionality for different user roles? Or maybe conduct some performance testing?

All of the above was true for us and rather than going Sitecore > Security Tools > User Manager > New then type, type, type and click, click, click, we headed for SiteCore PowerShell Extension. Cos…

Sitecore Admin Pages Cheat Sheet – New Tools

Posted on August 23 by jammykam

There have been a few posts which list and explains the various Sitecore Admin Pages and what they do, such as this post by fellow MVP Nikola Gocev, this post by Bjørn Klinggaard and numerous other posts as well.

I won’t repeat the useful info already in those posts. But did you know there are a few new tools in the admin pages?

Wondering how you missed them? The release notes for Sitecore 8.1 Update-2 states the following:

The main highlights of this update:
– Includes all relevant fixes from Sitecore 7.2 update-6

Like you, most of us probably skipped over that line for our Sitecore 8.1 upgrades, but there was some useful info in those release notes.

Creating a custom Sitecore-like Context

Posted on March 29, 2016 by jammykam

Often when working in Sitecore we extend the solution using pipeline processors, one of the most common being the httpRequestBegin pipeline. This is also where a lot of the Sitecore goodness happens – site resolving, database resolving, device resolving, language resolving and item resolving – amongst many others.

Resolving things can be expensive. It takes up precious processing time and cpu cycles, so when you have to run a piece of code you only want to do that once. It’s the same reason that Sitecore puts a lot of data into the Context object for use throughout the request. So it would be handy if we could resolve our own code only once and make it available during the request as well.

Mass Uploading Media

Posted on March 11, 2016 by jammykam

Have you ever had the need to mass upload media into Sitecore? Maybe you are migrating to Sitecore or your editors now want to upload a big set of images into the media library. Tired of Right Click > Insert > Upload File over and over again?

There are some built-in ways in Sitecore to easily do this.

SEO%20Friendly%20URLs – Watch out, it’s a trap!

Posted on February 29, 2016 by jammykam

Read my previous blog post about SEO Friendly URLs? Go have a read, I cover several methods of achieving SEO Friendly URLs.

Did you read it? Did you read that part about encodeNameReplacements? Yeah, I still don’t like them, but it seems like now we all have to deal with them at least.

Sitecore WFFM 101

Posted on February 20, 2016 by jammykam

A introduction and quick start to the Sitecore WebForms for Marketers module, a.k.a f***ing Webforms for f***ing Marketers.

What is it?
How to install
How to create a form
How to extend
Styling
Gotchas

Updating Sitecore Telerik RTE to disable XHTML and strip MS-Word Formatting on Paste

Posted on February 9, 2016 by jammykam

The RTE field in Sitecore is a little bit old fashioned and a little stricter than the most of us would like, especially when you are working with tech savvy editors who may prefer to work directly in the HTML. The current project I am working on is based on the Foundation framework and like most frameworks a lot of the features are enabled using data-* attributes.

Unfortunately the Telerik controls used in Sitecore try to be super helpful and strip out any invalid XHTML. Also unfortunately data-* attributes are HTML5, and not XHTML 😦

Excluding Sitecore Assemblies from Deployment using Publish Settings

Posted on January 20, 2016 by jammykam

During another recent conversation on Sitecore Slack chat we discussing solutions with a large number of projects, and the fact that it is recommended to set CopyLocal=false for references (see here and here) since it optimizes Visual Studio builds and can reduce build times. The problem however is that setting this value causes you to lose Intellisense from your Razor Views/Webform controls, although everything should continue to build and work as expected though.

That’s a fairly big price to pay! Another advantage of setting CopyLocal=false is that those DLLs are not included in the output directory of your build. More than likely you have a process to deploy a vanilla instance of Sitecore to the server or it is installed on the server, so there is no need to re-deploy the basic DLLs like Sitecore.Kernel.dll or Sitecore.Mvc.dll for example. More recently, we had an issue where the local version of our Coveo install was a slightly different version to the ones on the server, which meant that these assemblies should not be deployed either.

Specifying query and parameters for Sitecore Treelist Field Source

Posted on January 6, 2016 by jammykam

Just before the Christmas break I got into a conversation with Robbert Hock on Slackchat about Sitecore fields and specifying a queryable source for the Treelist field in Sitecore 8.1. As you may be aware, several of the Sitecore fields support specifying an XPath query in the field source and others support an enhanced syntax using parameters.

From Sitecore 7.2 Update-2 the Treelist and TreelistEx fields also started to support specifying a query in the Source field.

Released Sitecore CMS and DMS 7.2 rev. 140526 (7.2 Update-2)
Field types
The Treelist and TreelistEx classes now support Sitecore query in the source for these field types. (319249)

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