Quietest…Release…Ever

Sitecore 6.2 was released last night in probably the quietest release Sitecore has done in a long time. Why am I saying it was a quiet release? Well I had no idea it was coming and only found out after reading John West’s blog and finding a reference to the new version hidden in [...]

Few things going on in Sitecore land?

There’s a few things going on at the moment in the world of Sitecore.
Firstly the Sitecore Australian and New Zealand user group is having it’s second user group meeting, this time in Sydney Australia on 28th October 2009. Tim Ward, Solution Architect for Sitecore Australia will be taking attendees through some of the new features [...]

Copy and Paste Items Server to Server

Sitecore has done a very good job of making item management in Sitecore very much like file management in your OS. Operations such as moving items, ordering items, copying and pasting items is as simple as a drag or a click. All this works quite well, but only for the current server you’re on.
If you [...]

Team Development with Sitecore the Easy way

Most of the Sitecore implementations I’m involved in have me working in a team environment. In fact, this is pretty normal for any IT project. Although a team environment has many benefits, there are also some complexities that need to be addressed in terms of keeping the development environment in sync.
There are two things that [...]

Composite Presentation Inheritance

I have often wanted a way in Sitecore to be able to define most of my pages presentation in a base template but customise that presentation on more specific items.
Sitecore has a facility to inherit default values through the use of data template standard values. This mechanism works for all fields including presentation (__renderings field). [...]

Techniques for Sharing Content

This post is based on the materials I recently presented to the Sitecore Australia & New Zealand User Group.
Sitecore allows the sharing of content due to the separation of content from presentation. In fact, you can consider the presentation to itself be content as the presentation definition for an item is stored in a field; [...]

OMS Analytics

With the release of Sitecore 6.1 and OMS last week, I can finally write about it! I was lucky enough a few months ago to be invited to a sneak peak session for Sitecore’s new product the Online Marketing Suite (OMS), previously called “Everest” (Everest was actually the title given to Sitecore 6.1 and OMS [...]

Distributed Authoring

Recently I’ve been contemplating how Sitecore could handle distributed authoring. This was largely prompted by a request in a demonstration I was giving where the client had multiple offices and wanted each office to be able to author content in Sitecore with the best performance. Depending on your network rules, as long as Sitecore is [...]

Item Auto Golive and Expire

Sitecore supports setting publishing restrictions on content items using dates for when the content should go live and when to take the content off the live site. I find many content authors expect these changes to their content to happen automatically, but in Sitecore’s model a publish operation still needs to occur to have the [...]

Magic unpublish button

Recently I posted the question Alex de Groot asked the Sitecore community last year; “Show Sitecore how to improve…” (I paraphrased to “What’s your Sitecore wishlist”) to the Sitecore Australia and New Zealand users group. A few ideas flew around, one of which was a small feature request to have a magical “unpublish” button for [...]