I'm Bluffing

So, this weekend it is finally upon us. The Sitecore Symposium at Barcelona... We are going with a strong delegation from The Reference in order to capture and soak up every aspect of the Symposium and the future of Sitecore. Expect updates on this blog and twitter with regards to the Symposium in the comming days ! Kind regards

A new session of the Sitecore user group is up and comming. This time the event will be hosted in Ghent, in the Zebrastraat location. More details can be found here: http://www.meetup.com/Sitecore-User-Group-Belgium/events/197698722/ But I have listed the details below as well: Sitecore User Group (SUG) BELUX #2 - Sitecore Symposium Highlights & How-to CRM This event aims at building an eclectic Sitecore community to share experience and knowledge. •  Welcome:  Shor t introduction into the agenda and future SUG approach.  •  Session 1 : Sitecore Symposium Highlights  Sitecore Symposium Barcelona on September 15-17. The Sessions, The Speakers, The Roadmap, The Vision. We will try to capture as much information as possible and compress everything into a good first high-level presentation. Follow-up sessions on specific topics may be needed to show the opportunities and impact that certain new product features might bring. Insight presentation and...

Introduction This post mainly focusses on Sitecore's approach and ability to handle modules and add-on functionalities. What Sitecore's focus is and what they have in store for us in the near future. Furthermore : What is the idea behind modules (in Sitecore) Where can we find modules What are some of the best modules out there What is the Sitecore vision and strategy ? This blog post is inspired on the presentation given on the first SUG-BeLux event where I hosted this session. More information can be found here:  http://www.meetup.com/Sitecore-User-Group-Belgium/events/185264512/ More specifcally, the presentation on Sitecore and modules can be found here: http://files.meetup.com/14353282/Sitecore%20Modules.pptx All presentations and information provided by the SUG can always be found here: http://www.meetup.com/Sitecore-User-Group-Belgium/files/ What is the idea behind modules? Modules are meant to serve as catalysts. Either by providing be...

How to keep track of what Sitecore items have been published I recently got this question from a colleague who was looking into a customer reported issue. He was wondering if he could see if this specific page/item has already been published. The default answer here would be to check the "Web" db or any other publishing target. However, this is a tedious task when checking multiple pages as well as when these pages are nested deeply within your root structure. So I decided to see what the web had to offer with regards to this. I first found a Sitecore answer that gave a list of the Items that were in the publish queue. This provides insight into what has NOT been published yet. But does not show what HAS been published: http://sdn.sitecore.net/Forum/ShowPost.aspx?postid=26498 This was however not what I needed, an I continued on... The solution come from Stack Exchange: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15172346/sitecore-flag-new-items-as-unpubli...

Multi-Site setup with Sitecore Sitecore is in my opinion one of the easiest CMS's out there to facilitate a multi-site setup. It offers a number of approaches to doing so. You can either create entirely different structures and implement it as such so that through security and configuration entire different structures can be disclosed while at the same time specific content can still be shared in one location. But you can just as easily decide that a specific node within your website should function as a seperate site with its own visualisation and behavior. For example, you might want the following structure within Sitecore : " Corporate Home > Tertiary pages > B2B > Support " to be disclosed under the following url: http://www.corporate.com/support/ In order to do so I tend to revert to the Virutal Site setup that is available within Sitecore How-To Siteore configures its mapping of the various path, hostnames, databases and so on thr...

Case A web editor has created a large amount of content that is ready to be published. However, in order to get the final 'OK' on this newly created content, he needs to get the buy-in of specific persons in the company. The default answer here would be to use the Sitecore preview mode or use well devised workflows within sitecore that are automatically notifying the correct group of persons by sending mails or updating their RSS coupling (in outlook for example). These notifications would in turn push the stakeholder into taking the right actions needed to ensure the content gets published in the correct form. However,  what is the best possible approach if your target audience has no knowlegde whatsoever of Sitecore? Users that don't have an account and can not (or should not) be motivated into adopting your well designed Sitecore content approval approach ? At that point the Sitecore Live Mode can come into play and offer a relatively elegant solution. ...

DateRange utility class Throughout development there are a number of typical things that tend to recur. One of these is implementing a means to display start and end dates for News, Events, Symposiums, Lives etc etc Writing a little class that manages printing these dates seemed like a necessary task that just had to be done in order to make this tedious task be a thing of the past. Therefore I created my "DateRange" class (what's in a name) that should handle this entirely for you. The Idea The intriquities of displaying a datetime range should be an abstraction. You should only need to worry about passing the correct dates (start and end - if applicable) to the Utility class combined with an optional formatting. The class can be entirely configured through use of Enumerations for all the separate settings such as DayFormat etc. An additional class was used to implement this utility, the StringValue attribute class. You can easily use thie class to a...