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John West, CTO, Sitecore USA, Inc.

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John West, Chief Technology Officer

Sitecore Rocks Plugins and Extensions

By John West, June 22, 2011 | Rating:  | Leave a comment

Sitecore logo over rocks

This blog post describes plugins and extensions for Sitecore Rocks, an extension to Visual Studio for developers working with the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS. For more information about Sitecore Rocks, see my blog post Introducing Sitecore Rocks. For more information about Sitecore Rocks extensions, see my blog post Sitecore Rocks Extensions.

Just like Sitecore itself, you can customize Sitecore Rocks with plugins and extensions. Creating Visual Studio Projects on http://vsplugins.sitecore.net explains how to create a Visual Studio project for a plugin. I should mention that this post is largely based on a review of the existing documentation on this site, and I haven't even completed that reading; I have not confirmed everything as described. Note the terminology: Sitecore is an extension to Visual Studio, and Sitecore Rocks further supports both plugins and extensions.

There are apparently more ways to extend Sitecore Rocks than I could describe. Sitecore Rocks supports four main extension techniques:

  • Commands implement context-menu entries for fields and items in the item editor, items in Solution Explorer, and potentially other encapsulated logic. One form of extension is a quick shortcut to a command.
  • Field Controls are typically WPF UserControls that represent field types in the item editor.
  • Item Editor Skins represent views of the database, such as default, tabbed, two-column, or database browser.
  • Pipelines in Sitecore Rocks are similar to those in the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS. For more information about pipelines in Sitecore Rocks, see my blog post Sitecore Rocks Pipelines.

Addition extension points include:

The Sitecore Rocks extensibility documentation provides much greater detail on each of these concepts, including server-side components. You can upload and download sample plugins at http://vsplugins.sitecore.net/Plugins.aspx.

Sitecore rocks extensions typically reference Sitecore.Rocks.dll. I would avoid dependence on Sitecore.VisualStudio.dll unless necessary.

Rocks loads the appropriate assemblies from the equivalent of the c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Sitecore\Sitecore.Rocks\Plugins subdirectory. If your solution requires a server component, name it beginning with Sitecore.Rocks.Server, and build and deploy for a single .NET framework version.

To review available Sitecore Rocks plugins, including source code, in Visual Studio, on the Sitecore menu, click Plugin Repository...

For information about debugging plugins, see Debugging a Plugin. For comprehensive information about Sitecore Rocks plugins, find the text "plugin" in http://vsplugins.sitecore.net/AllPages.aspx (entries relevant to plug-ins exist under a number of categories). Please post any suggestions for product improvement on the Sitecore Rocks forum on the Sitecore Developer Network (SDN).

In some ways, the hard part is to think of value #therocksguy has not already delivered. I wonder if we could build a workflow workbox into Sitecore Rocks Windows. I wonder if ASP.NET developers could find value in Sitecore Rocks even when not using Sitecore.

Tags: API, Architecture, Infrastructure, Integration

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