Apropos Sitecore blog: Sitecore

TDS code generation source code on GitHub

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 14 November 2012

I have added updated my code generation PoC files on GitHub. I have also created a repository with TDS v.4 code generation T4 templates if anyone is interested in those. Read more ►

Sitecore 6.6 (technology preview) and MVC 4

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 02 October 2012

Disclaimer: This is not tested thoroughly and I have only posted here for the benefit of people experimenting with MVC and Sitecore 6.6 technology preview. I know there is no official MVC 4 support in the technology preview but I was looking at the upgrade path for a pure MVC application from MVC 3 to MVC 4 and it seemed almost to easy - here is what the ASP.NET team says you need to do: Upgrading an ASP.NET MVC 3 project to MVC 4.  I… Read more ►

Sitecore item paths with IntelliSense (auto-generated)

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 21 May 2012

A while ago I presented my Sitecore model auto-generation concept to Sitecore’s UK User Group. One of the perspectives I mentioned in my presentation was using the technique to generate item paths. The idea was that this would eliminate a lot of the magic strings representing paths and IDs. My initial thought was to generate a list of constants that could be used in conjunction with the item factory. Before I ever got started on this… Read more ►

Auto-generating a Glass model with TDS and T4

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 09 May 2012

I just read a great blog post by Mike Edwards on using the T4/TDS auto-generation framework to generate a Glass model for Sitecore. This example really shows how versatile the concept is and how it can be used to generate any model for Sitecore: http://www.glass.lu/?page_id=590 Also: Hedgehog recently announced that TDS v4 will have support for T4 code generation - so hopefully we can soon say bye bye to the clunky post… Read more ►

Visual List Sitecore Shared Source contribution

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 16 April 2012

On a recent project I used the Visual List field from the Sitecore Shared Source repository. The FieldTypes project has been around for a while so I was surprised to find that the field type was missing support for languages and item versions and had poor integration with the Content Editor's field validation facility. There are no other means of maintaining a list of images in Sitecore that offers the same degree of usability for… Read more ►

Using CloudFront CDN for Sitecore media content

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 23 April 2012

Ever since I discovered that Amazon CloudFront supported custom origins I have been thinking about how it could be used in a Sitecore solution. If you set up a custom origin pointing to your website it will effectively work as a caching proxy (edge cache). This can take some of the load off your Sitecore server and give a general boost to page performance* which again could have a positive affect on your SEO ranking. URL rewriting In this… Read more ►

TDS to get T4 code generation in upcoming version

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 19 April 2012

Great news today. The guys at Hedgehog Development has just announced that the upcoming version of TDS will have T4 code generation built in. Here is a sneak peak from Hedgehogs YouTube channel: If you have read my blog post on Automatic Sitecore Model Generation you see that it's a very similar workflow to the one described in the video. I'm very excited about trying out the code generation feature of TDS. It looks like TDS will give a better… Read more ►

Sitecore Most Valuable Professionals 2011

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 10 April 2012

Sitecore announced the Sitecore MVPs for 2011 in a press release today. I'm honoured to be selected for the MVP program for a second time and hope that it will be a constructive two years ahead where we can make Sitecore even better. Here is an excerpt from the press release: "MVPs are technology experts who inspire others to learn and grow through active participation in the Sitecore technical community," said Lars Nielsen, senior vice… Read more ►

Sitecore authentication with WIF

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 12 April 2012

I was recently asked by my friends over at Confused.com to look into using Windows Identity Foundation to do claims based authentication for Sitecore. WIF comes pre-packed with all you need to do federated security and you can use the components either as they are or customise them to meet your specific requirements. WIF integrates nicely with ASP.Net and most websites could easily be adapted to use Passive STS for authentication. Unfortunatel… Read more ►

Sitecore 404 without 302

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 27 March 2012

As I recently migrated the "Apropos Sitecore" blog from Typepad to Sitecore I put some effort in to setting up legacy URL rewriting. In case I missed anything I wanted to ensure that the 404 handling on the new blog was set up appropriately. I have always felt that the default way Sitecore handles 404 request was a bit annoying. If a users misspells a URL or perhaps misses out a couple of characters when copying a URL they will be redirected… Read more ►

Automatic Sitecore Model Generation

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 15 March 2012

There are several model frameworks available for Sitecore. They all have their strengths and weaknesses – but common for all of them are that they represent Sitecore items as strongly typed objects in code. My motivation for creating what one guy at Sitecore User Group London described as “yet another model generation framework” was not to invent a new way of composing strongly typed objects. It was an attempt to introduce an alternative… Read more ►

Shared source contribution

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 20 October 2011

I recently did a post on integrating the Image Cropper module seamlessly with the sc:image control. I am happy to announce that this additional functionality is now part of the module on Sitecore Shared Source and that I am now officially a Shared Source contributor :) Thanks to Julian Gilchrist from Igloo who initially contributed the ImageCropper and to our very helpful Shared Source Coordinator Jimmie Overby. Read more ►

Removing Sitecore configuration elements via include files

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 26 July 2011

After a recent discussion on the SDN forum I thought it would be worth mentioning that it is possible to remove elements form the Sitecore configuration with a patch command (it may not always have been there - but this works in Sitecore 6.5). Here is an example: <configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/"> <sitecore> <pipelines> <preprocessRequest> <processor type=&q… Read more ►

ImageCropper and sc:image - the missing piece

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 28 July 2011

About a year ago a wanted to do a blog post on an image cropping processor. Only after writing all the code (doh!) I realised that one was already available in the shared source repository - ImageCropper. This is a brilliant extension of Sitecore's image resizing functionality that ensures that you always get a perfectly cropped image - regardless of the proportions of the image that the editors have uploaded. When the pipeline… Read more ►

Renderings vs. Sublayouts

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 30 June 2011

This is a question that I'm confronted with again and again - and just today it surfaced again: When should we use Sublayouts and when should we use XSL Renderings? Which is better? I guess my answer has always been a bit vague; it depends on what you are trying to do! Use a screwdriver for screws and a hammer for nails. I have always used XSLT renderings for simple presentation and I think it's an… Read more ►

Sitecore + TDS + T4 Text Template

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 12 April 2011

Inspired by the Compiled Domain Model and other code generation tools for Sitecore, I came up with a different approach to generating classes and eliminating magic strings. In most cases the code generator uses the Sitecore API to traverse items in a Sitecore database to generate classes that represent templates and items. I cannot help feeling that basing the generated code on data from a database is a little detached from the codebase that… Read more ►

Heads up: Caching statically included renderings

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 13 August 2010

Adding Renderings and Sublayouts in Sitecore can be done in two ways. Dynamically - Renderings/Sublayouts are added via the page designer or layout details dialog. Statically - Renderings/Sublayouts are added in-line in the HTML code for a Sublayout/Layout. When adding Sublayouts/Renderings dynamically the caching attributes can be assigned to either the Sublayout/Rendering definition item (in /sitecore/layouts/...) - this sets the default… Read more ►

Sitecore Most Valuable Professionals 2009

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 27 January 2010

Today Sitecore announced the Sitecore MVPs for 2009 and I'm thoroughly chuffed to find my name on the list.Here is an excerpt from the press release:“The Sitecore MVP program recognizes those exceptional technology community leaders who actively evangelize and share their CMS knowledge with the Sitecore community,” said Lars Fløe Nielsen, VP, Technical Marketing, Sitecore. “With the MVP awards we want to thank these individuals for helping… Read more ►

Troublesome HR's and the RTE

By Kern Herskind Nightingale, 02 January 2010

I recently came across a (yet another) IE7 annoyance. If you try and style a HR tag with a background image it is seemingly impossible to avoid the border around the image in IE7. After scouring the web I came across a solution that solves the problem and retains the HR tag (I reckon that is the best solution from a semantic point of view). So how do I go about having Sitecore's Rich Text Editor insert HR's like this: <div class="hr"><… Read more ►