Book Description
Over 70 incredibly effective and practical recipes to get you up and running with Sitecore development
About This Book
- Build enterprise-level rich websites quickly and deliver the best possible content management to your website
- Get maximum usage of functionalities like different user interfaces, workflow, publishing, search, analytics, etc and learn different rendering techniques using presentation components for data bindings, events, handlers, schedulers, media, etc.
- Add a surprising amount of functionality just by customizing the Sitecore architecture through the best practices contained in this book
Who This Book Is For
If you are a Sitecore developer or a programmer who wants to expand your Sitecore development skills, this book is ideal for you. You will need working knowledge of ASP.NET WebForms or MVC, as well as HTML, and a basic knowledge of Sitecore installation.
What You Will Learn
- Create, access, and personalize your website content using different Sitecore presentation components
- Learn how to extend the presentation components to fulfill some real-life requiremnts such as improving the site’s performance, generating Rss feeds and so on
- Work with multiple websites on a single Sitecore instance and create multilingual websites
- Customize the Sitecore interfaces as per your business requirements to provide easier and error-free user interface to content authors to save time and improve accuracy
- Customize the Sitecore backend architecture as per your business needs
- Automate tasks and achieve scalability by altering the development and configuration settings
- Integrate external systems with Sitecore to import or export content and secure user interactions
- Integrate the advanced features of analytics and personalization, to get the best possible customer experience and generate its reports
In Detail
This book will get you started on building rich websites, and customizing user interfaces by creating content management applications quickly. It will give you an insight into web designs and how to customize the Sitecore architecture as per your website's requirements using best practices.
Packed with over 70 recipes to help you achieve and solve real-world common tasks, requirements, and the problems of content management, content delivery, and publishing instance environments. It also presents recipes on Sitecore’s backend processes of customizing pipelines, creating custom event handler and media handler, setting hooks and more. Other topics covered include creating a workflow action, publishing sublayouts and media files, securing your environment by customizing user profiles and access rights, boosting search capabilities, optimising performance, scalability and high-availability of Sitecore instances and much more.
By the end of this book, you will have be able to add virtually limitless features to your websites by developing and deploying Sitecore efficiently.
Style and approach
This easy-to-follow guide is full of hands-on recipes on real-world development tasks to improve your existing Sitecore system. Each topic is presented with its benefits and detailed steps to achieve it through well-explained code and images.
Downloading the example code for this book. You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the code file.
Table of Contents
-
Sitecore Cookbook for Developers
- Table of Contents
- Sitecore Cookbook for Developers
- Credits
- About the Author
- About the Reviewer
- www.PacktPub.com
- Preface
-
1. Basic Presentation Components
- Introduction
- Creating a simple content page using template and layout
- Creating a sidebar menu using view rendering and RenderingModel
- Creating breadcrumb using the view and custom model
- Creating carousel using view and controller renderings
- Placing renderings dynamically using placeholders
- Empowering the Experience Editor using placeholder settings
- Restricting or swapping rendering controls on placeholders
-
2. Extending Presentation Components
- Introduction
- Altering rendering behavior using component properties
- Creating strongly typed rendering parameters
- Achieving asynchronous operations using a custom device
- Creating multilingual content pages
- Generating RSS feeds for syndicated items
- Improving site performance by caching renderings
- Personalizing components
-
3. Customizing the User Interface Framework
- Introduction
- Adding a custom command to item context menu
- Creating a gutter to show unpublished items
- Creating a Sheer UI application using XAML control to list products
- Creating a SPEAK application to list and sort products
- Searching and filtering products using SPEAK
- Building a custom form to bind product details using SPEAK
- Creating a custom editor tab in the Content Editor
- Creating a custom experience button using the Field Editor
- Creating a custom rule to validate item fields
- Creating a custom sorting routine to sort the content tree items
- Creating a custom field to save the date time with time zones
-
4. Leveraging the Sitecore Backend
- Introduction
- Working with multiple sites
- Customizing pipelines to achieve a custom 404 page
- Creating a custom event handler to auto-publish on an item save
- Achieving a site-specific URL pattern for a multisite environment
- Initializing hooks to subscribe events to prepare an audit trail
- Creating jobs to accomplish long-running operations
- Using a scheduling agent to delete older item versions
- Scheduling database tasks
-
5. Making Content Management More Efficient
- Introduction
- Using dictionary domains for multilingual sites on a multisite environment
- Creating vanity URLs for marketing purposes using an alias item
- Centralizing common content using a clone item
- Using a wildcard item to integrate external content
- Placing dynamic content in the Rich Text Editor by replacing tokens
- Adding a custom tool to the Rich Text Editor to generate tokens
- Dealing with user-generated content using an Item Web API
- Storing external content using a custom cache
- 6. Working with Media
-
7. Workflow and Publishing
- Introduction
- Creating a custom action using workflow
- Achieving time-based automated publishing
- Unpublishing of items
- Using publishing events to send a publish completion e-mail
- Publishing file-based items using web deploy
- Clearing an HTML cache based on published items for a multisite environment
- Customizing the publishItem pipeline to avoid duplicate names on a live site
- 8. Security
-
9. Sitecore Search
- Introduction
- Indexing, searching, sorting, and paging content using a search query
- Creating a computed index field for categorization
- Refining search results by tagging based facets
- Achieving the autocomplete feature with a wildcard
- Influencing search results with boosting
- Hunting MoreLikeThis results
- Correcting a search with did you mean
- Managing millions of items using an item bucket
-
10. Experience Personalization and Analytics Using xDB
- Introduction
- Personalizing experience based on goals and Engagement Values
- Personalizing content by predicting a visitor's profile
- Storing visitor information in xDB contacts
- Extending xDB by creating a custom contact facet
- Creating a custom rule and condition for personalization
- Automating the engagement plan
- Finding nearby places using the Geolocation service
- Aggregating xDB data to generate custom reports
- Extending analytics reports using custom dimensions
- Creating section-specific analytics reports using custom dimensions
-
11. Securing, Scaling, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting
- Introduction
- Profiling and tracing content pages to find out the slowest operations
- Transferring items from one database to another
- Making security-hardened environments
- Adding multiple publishing targets for scalability or preproduction
- Creating clustered instances for scalability and performance
- Getting high availability of Sitecore instances
- Improving the performance of Sitecore instances
- A. Getting Started with Sitecore
- B. Tools and Resources for Sitecore Developers
- Index