Chapter 1, Basic Presentation Components, focuses on creating information architecture and presenting it using out-of-the-box components and different Model-View-Controller (MVC) renderings. It also shows how effectively you can utilize out-of-the-box components to provide greater ease and flexibility for future enhancements.

Chapter 2, Extending Presentation Components, gives examples for extending out-of-the-box components to develop multilingual and multidevice websites, integrate the content with external systems, and provide easier content management for content owners.

Chapter 3, Customizing the User Interface Framework, demonstrates you how to create new interfaces or extend existing interfaces, using different framework components. It also provides some recipes to please content authors.

Chapter 4, Leveraging the Sitecore Backend, gets you completely involved in Sitecore backend architecture. This chapter gives you a brief tour of different the features to extend the core engine using pipelines, processors, events, handlers, hooks, jobs, schedulers, and so on.

Chapter 5, Making Content Management More Efficient, shows you different tricks and techniques to manage the content in a better way and provide better usability with the use of backend and frontend frameworks and different functionalities such as dictionary, validations, rule engine, Rich Text Editor, Item Web API, and so on.

Chapter 6, Working with Media, explores different techniques while working with Sitecore media items such as securing them, serving them through content delivery network (CDN), and utilizing them for responsive web designs.

Chapter 7, Workflow and Publishing, shows how you can extend the workflow and publishing architecture to achieve scheduled publishing and unpublishing, using web deploy while publishing and customizing pipeline and events.

Chapter 8, Security, explains how to create different user profiles and give custom permissions to it. It also explains how to achieve single sign-on (SSO) securely and allow extranet access in a secure way.

Chapter 9, Sitecore Search, describes different techniques for accessing data from indexing. It explains how to implement different search techniques, which modern search engines use such as tagging, autosuggest, boosting search results, finding more like this, and did you mean.

Chapter 10, Experience Personalization and Analytics Using xDB, explains how to provide the best user experience using different techniques of real-time personalization, it is the heart of marketing programs. It also briefs features for engaging users. This chapter will also provide good recipes to use and extend Experience Database (xDB) and generate different analytics reports.

Chapter 11, Securing, Scaling, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting, focuses on different techniques for making the Sitecore environment more secure. It also explains techniques to troubleshoot slowness, create clustered environments to get better performance, high availability, and scalability. It also briefs some techniques to troubleshoot.

Appendix A, Getting Started with Sitecore, contains information to help you in Sitecore installation, and create a project for your Sitecore solution using Microsoft Visual Studio.

Appendix B, Tools and Resources for Sitecore Developers, provides information on tools and resources available for Sitecore developers to install, and maximize their productivity and expertise by using it.

The minimum requirements for this book would be Sitecore 8 or later, .NET Framework 4.5 or later, ASP.NET MVC 5.1 or later, MS SQL 2008 R2 or later, and IIS 7.5 or later. You can refer to Sitecore Compatibility Table at https://goo.gl/4kkCHe for more details.

It is recommended that you use a plain Sitecore setup to implement the recipes of this book in order to avoid unnecessary conflicts with existing implementations.

To download and install Sitecore and create a project, you can refer to Appendix A, Getting Started with Sitecore, which you will find at the end of this book.

If you are a Sitecore developer or programmer who wants to expand your Sitecore development skills, this book is ideal for you. As this book targets readers of various experience levels, you should be able to find recipes of beginner, intermediate, and advanced nature. You will need working knowledge of ASP.NET WebForms or MVC, as well as HTML, and a basic knowledge of Sitecore installation.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Make sure that you have added a reference of Sitecore.Kernel.dll and Sitecore.Mvc.dll files to the SitecoreCookbook project."

A block of code is set as follows:

<div id="header"> <a href="/">
  @Html.Sitecore().Field("Logo",
    Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem(
    "/sitecore/Content/Global/Configurations"))
</a> </div>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<div id="sidemenu">
  @Html.Sitecore().Rendering("{2383A57F-21FF-4A77-9E2A-C467F0CEDA57}")
</div>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "From the ribbon, select Standard Values in the Builder Options tab."

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To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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