WeBlog Summit 2011

Ealier this year in April, Sitecore’s Dreamcore US event was held in Boston. One of my WeBlog colleagues, Nick Wesselman, gave a presentation at the event on the shared source WeBlog module. There was quite a lot of buzz around the module, especially from Sitecore themselves, who saw what we were doing with the module as a great example of Sitecore community.

One of the interesting things about this module and how it’s developed is the geographical disparity of the contributors. At Dreamcore US, someone made the comment about how it would be great if the 3 WeBlog contributors (me, Mark van Aalst and Nick) could get together somewhere and have a summit, to go through the current module and work out the future direction of the module.

And that’s exactly what is going to happen in just under two weeks. Sitecore is sponsoring each of us to travel to Sitecore HQ in Copenhagen and have this summit.

And it’s going to be a great event! Lars Nielsen is currently coordinating to give the WeBlog contributors access to some of the Sitecore core developers and architects at the summit. This access will allow us to really align the module with Sitecore’s future direction, and ensure we’re ready to leverage all the cool new stuff coming in Sitecore Massive (and believe me, from what I’ve seen, there is some very cool stuff coming).

I’m also hoping we can get the first official release of WeBlog out there to the greater Sitecore community.

So if you’d like to have a say in the future of WeBlog or you’d like to request a feature or change, head over to the Sitecore Developer Network and post your ideas in the EviBlog/WeBlog forum.

Dreamcore AU 2011

It was my great pleasure to present at Sitecore’s Dreamcore event in Sydney, Australia this week. This was the first time the conference was held in Australia and it was fantastic with lots of great speakers and interesting people.

My session was titled “Testing Strategies for Sitecore” and was run in the developer stream, so it focused on automated/unit testing. As promised for everyone who attended my session, here is the code for my demo site and test project, as well as the slides.

• Source code for demo site
• Slides for Testing Strategies for Sitecore

The test project shows a few different techniques for automated testing your Sitecore projects including:

• Testing pages over HTTP
• Testing using a web browser driver (WatiN)
• Instantiating a Sitecore control
• Testing within the HTTP Context
• Testing without an HTTP Context

I’ve covered all of the above techniques before, except for the last one, testing without an HTTP Context. I’ll cover that technique in detail in a future post.