Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

By : Yogesh Patel

Buy this Book

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

By: Yogesh Patel

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

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.

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

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

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

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Creating a gutter to show unpublished items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

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

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

Working with Media

Introduction

Restricting malicious files being uploaded to the media library

Downloading the media library folder

Protecting media files under a disclaimer

Achieving responsive images

Serving media files from CDN or external storage

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

Security

Introduction

Working with a custom user profile

Creating custom access rights for an item

Achieving a single sign-on by creating a virtual user with custom roles and rights

Preventing Sitecore from applying security

Implementing extranet login

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

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

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

Getting Started with Sitecore

Installing Sitecore

Creating a Visual Studio project

Debugging a Sitecore application

Tools and Resources for Sitecore Developers

Useful tools for Sitecore developers

Useful resources for Sitecore developers

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Using a wildcard item to integrate external content

You have learned different ways to render the Sitecore content, but sometimes, we may need to fetch some data from external systems such as an external database, feeds, and so on, and render them on Sitecore.

In this recipe, we will consider an example of pulling news from an external database. On requesting, http://sitecorecookbook/News/2015 will pull news details of the year 2015.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we are pulling news details from an external database. Create a News table, as shown in the following image:

How to do it…

We will see how a wildcard item can support any virtual request on Sitecore:

In the SitecoreCookbook project, create a new controller NewsController class to fetch news details from an external database and register it in Sitecore:

public class NewsController : Controller
{
  public ActionResult NewsListing()
  {
    string year = WebUtil.GetUrlName(0);
    string strSQL = "SELECT * FROM News WHERE year(NewsDate)=...

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

By : Yogesh Patel

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

By: Yogesh Patel

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

Using a wildcard item to integrate external content

Getting ready

How to do it…