In versions of Sitecore prior to 7.5, many of us have used parameters in Sitecore’s controls (i.e. sc:image) to alter the size of an image. All works well if you use this strategy for image resizing. However, in some cases, we request the URL to a media item...
This blog post will describe the steps on how to create controller rendering in Sitecore MVC. One of the benefits of using controller rendering is to set aside the complex logic in the MVC controller. First, you need to create a definition item in the Sitecore tree....
While performing a large Sitecore upgrade, we ran across an issue during the step that required us to rebuild the search indexes. It seemed that after a few minutes of working as it should, the index rebuilding process would stop abruptly. Initially, we didn’t even...
For those of you who have been using our SymCal Event Calendar Module for Sitecore 6 and 7, we have recently uploaded a new version of the module that supports Sitecore 8. We also understand that Sitecore’s support for both ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC developers means...
If you’re using Sitecore 7.2 (or 7.5), you’ll notice that the traditional interface for browsing through media items has been improved. What was once the traditional SHEER version of the media browse/upload user interface has now become a more attractive SPEAK version...
When you install a default Sitecore 7 instance, you will notice that there is a “Sample Workflow” already configured for you. The final step of this workflow has an “Auto Publish” action, which automatically publishes an item once it reaches the final step of...
One of the most important aspects of maintaining a WYSIWYG editing experience is to make sure that the CSS that is used for your website is the same CSS that is used for your rich text editor. In Sitecore, this is pretty easy to accomplish through configuration....
In Sitecore, since it handles the media items through media url, there are query string parameters to control the media item’s properties. Below are some of them for images: w: Width in pixels h: Height in pixels mw: Maximum width in pixels mh: Maximum height in...
We all know that placeholders are an integral part of Sitecore, allowing us to add various components on a page that we have developed. You can even nest placeholders, so that a component placed in one placeholder can offer another placeholder that can house even more...
It is often an expensive task to manually publish both code and content for a Sitecore site manually to an integration environment. Usually, a person is assigned to be a “build master”, responsible for checking out and compiling code, making sure that everything works...
One very useful Glass Mapper method is called GlassCast. This method is essentially used to convert a regular Sitecore.Data.Items.Item into an Glass Mapper object that you have created. It’s really handy when you have issued queries in your code for certain...
In the Form Designer property panel, there is an option “CSS Class ” for you to choose which css class to apply. Shown as the screenshot below: You can add additional custom class names to this dropdown list by adding Extended List Item to the following path:...
Because Sitecore is a CMS that supports multiple languages, you may often notice that links generated from code have the language specified in the link (for example, ‘en’). If you don’t want the language embedded in generated links, you can disable that...
Sitecore’s Web Form for Marketers module comes with its own analytics, in addition to those provided by Sitecore. You can access those analytics by highlighting a particular form and clicking the ‘Form Reports’ button in the Content Editor ribbon. See the screenshot...
We are strong proponents of allowing content authors to perform all of their authoring tasks using nothing but the Page Editor. However, you have to be familiar with the permissions required to perform certain actions in the Page Editor. Here are some quick points on...
I ran across an issue last week while working on a project. I had set up role based access to certain content items in the Sitecore tree, with inheritance for child items. However, I noticed that users that were members of that role did not have permissions to change...
Before we begin, the first question you may ask is: what is Glass Mapper? Simply put, it is an ORM tool. Traditional ORM tools (like NHibernate, or Entity Framework) connect to databases, and model classes in your Visual Studio project around objects that exist in...
If you have a sublayout that needs to get the URL of a media item, such as an image (item[“Image”]), here is a quick tip on how you can get that media URL in Sitecore. Item item = Sitecore.Context.Item; Sitecore.Data.Fields.ImageField imgField =...
