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Limitations of Cloning

By Adam Conn, October 25, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Comments (2)

Dolly the cloned sheep

When cloning was added to Sitecore 6.3, it was greeted as a very welcomed addition to Sitecore's functionality. Cloning allows you to create items that reference other items. This allows the clone to inherit values from the item the clone is based on, but also allows the clone to override those values.

The main limitation of cloning is that the current implementation does not extend into the physical world. The feature request has been submitted, but for technical reasons, it is unlikely to be added to the product any time soon :-) 

Which means that certain tasks we perform in our everyday lives will continue as they always have for the foreseeable future. One such task is that of finding good people you want to work with. And that is the real purpose of this blog post: to let you know about a job that someone reading a technical blog about Sitecore might be interested in.

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Rules Field Type and Sitecore 6.5

By Adam Conn, September 16, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Leave a comment

cep ruleset editor

Sitecore 6.5 introduces some great additions to the ruleset editor. One is built-in filtering, so you can quickly find the conditions and actions you are looking for. Another is the ability for the Rules field type to display conditions and actions or just conditions. This post explains how to configure a Rules field to support either option.

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Tags: API, UI

Wildcards and Data Driven URLs

By Adam Conn, September 12, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Comments (1)

Wildcard items in the Content Editor

Wildcard items in Sitecore are a convenient way to handle dynamic URLs. They let you pass data through the URL instead of relying on query string values that are appended to the URL. Then it is up to you to figure out where that data is in the URL, which is nothing difficult, but if you have a lot of wildcards in your site and a lot of controls that depend on them, this can become a management headache.

The Wildcard Module available on the Sitecore Shared Source library is designed to make handling wildcard items easier. This post explains how.

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Tags: API, Information Architecture

Visual Studio Remote Debugging

By Adam Conn, August 18, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Comments (1)

main image

Do you run Sitecore remotely but want to debug your code locally? Visual Studio supports remote debugging. There are a number of websites that describe how to configure remote debugging, but some things bear repeating.

I am writing this post with a specific scenario in mind: Sitecore is running in a virtual machine and Visual Studio is running on my local machine.  I want to be able to develop my code locally, deploy to the virtual machine, and debug my code locally.

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Tags: API

Visualizing Pattern Cards

By Adam Conn, July 28, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Leave a comment

radar charts

Profile and pattern cards are a new feature in Sitecore's Customer Engagement Platform. The idea is to streamline the process of profiling content and determining a visitor's profile. As a visitor navigates my site, Sitecore builds a visitor profile based on the content profiling configuration.

CEP generates radar charts to visualize profiles during content authoring. But how can do you see what that visitor profile is and how it compares to the patterns that have been defined?  In this post I will show how you can use radar charts to visualize profiles during content delivery in order to better understand how Sitecore's pattern matching features work.

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Tags: API, Web Analytics, Personalization

Tracking Across Channels Using QR Codes

By Adam Conn, July 05, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Comments (2)

QR code

Today Sitecore announced its aquisition of Pectora, a company that has developed a really stunning integration with Adobe InDesign.  One of the quotes from the press release is "a consumer can read a printed piece of collateral or signage, scan it with a smartphone camera and be automatically brought to a relevant Web page for a mobile experience, while tracking the campaign performance for the marketer." In this post I will explain how you can use QR codes to do this.

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Tags: Online Campaigns

SEO & Social Media Monitoring With Sitecore & Jungle Torch

By Adam Conn, June 01, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Leave a comment

Jungle Torch logo

Understanding how the web views your site is critical to building and maintaining a successful site. Are customers able to find you? What are people saying about your organization? Jungle Torch is a tool that helps to answer these and many other questions. Today, Sitecore and Jungle Torch announced a partnership that brings Jungle Torch to Sitecore CMS. In this post I will describe the integration between the products.

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Tags: Integration

Custom Access Rights

By Adam Conn, March 01, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Leave a comment

custom access rights

Sitecore's standard authorization model provides the ability to control permissions at a variety of levels of granularity: site, item, field, language and workflow.  This functionality is often sufficient for handling authorization-related requirements. 

But it doesn't handle all of them.  Authorization rights can be used to "allow" or "deny" comments.  What if you want to allow comments, but no more than 5 comments on any page?  Or if you want to prevent comments from being added to pages that are more than 30 days old? 

In this post I'm going to describe how to create a custom authorization that controls the ability to add comments to a page.  I also explain how properties can be defined on a specific right that provide additional levels of control.

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Tags: API

Extending Sitecore E-Commerce - Order Lines

By Adam Conn, January 26, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Leave a comment

Sitecore E-Commerce

A couple weeks ago I described how to extend the pricing model used by Sitecore E-Commerce Fundamental Edition.  That was a relatively simple example, because I needed to replace the component that is responsible for calculating a price.  This was a matter of extending functionality.  What about extending the data model?

When you buy a product online, often times additional products are offered to you based on that product.  For example, if you buy a camera you might be offered an extended warranty.  If your order consists of a single camera and a single extended warranty, the relationship is pretty clear and it's probably safe to assume the warranty applies to the camera.

But what if you buy two cameras at once, and you want a 5-year extended warranty on one camera and a 2-year extended warrantry on the other?  In that case, it becomes much more important to be able to associate the camera with its warranty. 

This requires that the data model be extended in order to accomodate the additional information (in this case, the fact that one order line is related to another).  This post explains how to do this using the example of product add-ons.

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Tags: eCommerce, API

Translation Management With Sitecore & Clay Tablet

By Adam Conn, January 18, 2011 | Permalink | Rating:  | Comments (3)

These days, it's not at all unusual for a website to support multiple languages. If you're someone who works with multilingual sites, you will definitely want to check out an integration module for Sitecore that Clay Tablet Technologies recently released. Want to learn a little more about it? Read on!  And read on even if you aren't interested in translation management, because what CTT has done is a great example of the level of integration Sitecore's technology partners are able achieve.

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Tags: Content Strategy, Content Authoring

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