Today I published a new client feature on the marketplace called DMS Gutters. This will install two gutters within the Content Editor that shows which items have running tests and personalized components. It will help the business user identifying which items contains tests and personalisation. You can download the installation package via the Sitecore Marketplace. You can find it here

Hi there, I’ve just released a new Sitecore Shared Source module on the Sitecore Marketplace. The Sitecore Partner AboutInformation Module shows Sitecore Partner information on the login page of Sitecore and in the About window in the Content Editor. Partners are usually very proud of their work, and with this module they can show who build this Sitecore website or platform. More information about the module: Module:        Sitecore Partner AboutInformation Module Developed by:    Robbert Hock (Sitecore MVP 2010) Company:    Kayee (http://www.kayee.nl) More Info »

Sitecore 7 is buzzing! While unsure about the release data, MVP around the world are taking the deep dive. So here we go, diving in the new Sitecore version. Search Operations Performing an action on a collection of items, always was a weak point and much requested feature by customers. For pre-Sitecore 7 installations we designed macro’s to support this, in our macro’s actions can be performed on collections of items (a collection being a combination of selected items and a rule). Sitecore 7 provides More Info »

Hi there, In february 5th 2013 I saw a tweet of Kevin Williams in which he wrote the following: Thanks, @Sitecore for renewing my Xpress license this morning. Was only down for couple hours. Could we get a “license expires in 7 days”? (https://twitter.com/williamsk000/status/298851632127549440) And when I saw that tweet, I noticed that the same problem already happened to me before and probably to many more. Ever seen the following screens? or I have to admit it’s a pain in the ass, More Info »

I was really thrilled to see that Sitecore 7 will support coded datsources. This is a feature we already implemented at our company in earlier sitecore versions (kudos for the idea for my colleague and fellow MVP Remco van Toor). Coded datasources are very powerful and are frequently used in our company. For example in our latest project we use the sitecore enterprise ecommerce module. Customers are located in the ecommerce database but we had the need to render them as a More Info »

By default Sitecore comes with a few default reports within the Engagement Analytics. Depending on the report you can get insights about the website or its visitors. You can filter those reports with the standard filters like business classification, country and state. But did you know that adding your own filters is fairly easy. Let’s say we have the following case: We have a standard Sitecore installation in which we define two seperate websites. To make this work we need to make More Info »

Hi there, Last wednesday the Sitecore User Group Netherlands (SUGNL) had a get together meeting in a café in Utrecht. This evening also the Dutch Umbraco User Group (DUUG) held their meeting in the same cafe. This time it wasn’t a batlle of Sitecore vs Umbraco, but a great meeting on Web Content Management software and on two great Content Management Systems. Here are some pictures: gr, Robbert

Hi there, Two weeks ago I wrote a blogpost on Sitecore Rock’s Query Analyzer (http://newguidnet/sitecore/2012/sitecore-rocks-query-analyzer-handy-queries/). Tonight I have some more queries that could come in handy! Get all the items from the MASTER database that have configured an assembly name in it: use master; select * from /sitecore//*[contains(@Assembly, '')] Get all the items from the CORE database that have configured an assembly name in it: use core; select * from /sitecore//*[contains(@Assembly, '')] By using a specific database, Sitecore Rock’s Query analyzer automatically More Info »

Recently I got a question from one of our partners for a field in which a user can select multiple images and also have a overview of the selected images. Of course there are a few available fieldtypes but there was a requirement to select the images in one dialog window. A example of this was the TreelistEx field, but that field only shows the images as tiny icons with the name of the image next to it. So I made a More Info »

Hi there, Tonight I was busy with Sitecore Rock’s Query Analyzer identifying a wrongly configured item. I thought I should share a couple of handy queries to quickly identify certain items. Identify which sublayouts have the Datasource Location filled: select @@name, @#Datasource Location# from /#sitecore#/#layout#/#Sublayouts#//* order by #Datasource Location# desc Identify which template fields use the ‘query:’ statement in the source: select @@name, @Source from /sitecore/templates/#User Defined#//*[contains(@Source, 'query:')]  order by Source desc Identify which template fields have configured something in the in More Info »

In my recent project I had the challenge to adjust the site context language to the location of the website visitor. That means determining the visitor’s country and related language based on its ip-adress. First of all some background information on the process of determining the context language. The process is going through the following steps: The sc_lang query string parameter The Sitecore.Data.FilePathLanguage property, containing the language as part of the url The language cookie associated with the context site The default language associated More Info »

You might recognize this scenario. During your project you encounter some problem and you need the help of Sitecore Support. You create a new ticket and then you need to wait until their first reply. If you only wrote down you issue and didn’t provide any log files, the first reply will probably be to provide those log files. Of course these log files are necessary (especially when your ticket isn’t a know issue) to investigate your problem. To speed things up More Info »

When talking to business users (people that actually work with Sitecore on a day to day base) I created a small list of minor custom changes that would help the business users with there day to day work. One of the items on this list is the condition for User Profile fields, by default the input of this field is a manual typed String. Which is a painful process for the business user They are not sure of the fieldname and go More Info »

For my presentation about the DMS datamodel I created a great amount of slides. I didn’t have time to show all the slides because I only had about 60 minutes to do the talk. I uploaded the complete slidedeck to Slideshare including additional slides about Profiling and Automation. The complete session has been recorded and will be shared after the Symposium. Thanks for attending the session and for the great questions. Hope you have enjoyed the session. If you have any feedback More Info »

With the Sitecore API it’s very easy to add items to the cache. You van use Sitecore.Caching.Cache to do the necessary operations. To add something to the cache you can use several overloads. Most of the time you want to add an expiration to the cached data. You have two different overloads to do this. Add(string key, object data, long dataLength, TimeSpan slidingExpiration) Add(string key, object data, long dataLength, DateTime absoluteExpiration) First method is to add a sliding expiration. The second method More Info »