Sitecore User Group in San Francisco / Bay Area

I would like to announce the formation of the first and only Sitecore User Group in the Bay Area.

My vision is to create a dedicated community for passionate Sitecore developers and end users devoted to learning new things and sharing experience about everything related to Sitecore CMS. Anybody can join. You can be either a beginner or experienced Sitecore developer, or end user.

Since Sitecore USA is headquartered in San Francisco, you have an amazing opportunity to get new information about the product directly from the vendor and get to meet the Sitecore folks!

The user group’s home is here. Join us!

8 Reasons to Use New Search in Sitecore

Greetings,

Back in 2010 at the first Dreamcore conference, I was honored to present on two topics: ”Data Retrieval Techniques with Sitecore” and “Using Lucene.NET with Sitecore”.

If you have not seen any of those, download the slides and check them out. I consider myself being a data guy, so that’s why I really enjoyed presenting on these topics. Not sure why, but I love everything about data access, and absolutely adore what Microsoft did with Entity Framework 4, especially the oData stuff. There is something truly exciting in seeing your data flow and materialize in one shape or another.

Anyways, back to the topic. During my presentation on Lucene/Sitecore marriage, I was showing that Sitecore actually has two (!!!) implementation of Lucene.NET. One is a legacy, what we call “old” search. Everything within Sitecore.Data.Indexing namespace is considered to be “old” search. It is configured and implemented differently, though it uses the same Lucene.NET dll. There is also the “new” search which is represented by a few classes within Sitecore.Search namespace.

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Sitecore Product URLs Amazon Style

If you are a Sitecore CMS developer and you love shopping on Amazon, you probably had the same thought: what would it take to re-create Amazon.com in Sitecore? Completely from scratch. Ok, maybe it’s just me.

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Dreamcore is going to be even more fun this year!

What could be more fun than meeting your fellow Sitecore Enthusiasts and visiting beautiful Boston, especially in springtime? Learning about what’s new coming out, share ideas and best practices.
Well, you must have heard, we are doing it again!

As we still working hard on the agenda, but here are two known facts:

1. Yes, I will be speaking about common implementation scenarios. Specifics are coming soon.

2. Now exclusive information…just overheard it in the corridors of the marketing department.

This time we are going to have a special guest speaker: Carl Franklin!
In the world of technology, you know Carl as one of the first VB programmers, an extra famous Microsoft enthusiast, and of course, a founder and co-host of .NET Rocks!, an Internet audio talk show for people like you an me.

Again, specifics will be coming later, but rest assured that Carl’s inspirational message will leave no doubt that .NET Rocks! Along with that, we will be doing our own part, and show you exactly why Sitecore Rocks!

It is going to be so much fun! See you all in Boston!

Dreamcore 2011 is coming April 19-20, 2011 in Boston. Sign up now!

Color Picker Field for Sitecore

Here is a late Christmas present for the Sitecore community. A “ColorPicker” custom field that helps storing color codes in Sitecore.

The idea is simple: have a single line text box for color code storage and present the user with a good looking dialog to pick the color.

Technically speaking, there are two ways of color picking implemented.
The first approach is using native Internet Explorer’s color picker dialog and it is getting called via JavaScript.
The second one is using a custom built XamlSharp dialog with a ColorPicker control from ComponentArt. If you are using non IE browsers, the second dialog will be called.

Here is a short video about how it works. Turn those mics on!

Color Picker Module for Sitecore

Here are the installation steps:

1. Download the appropriate Sitecore package.
If you are planning on building the project yourself, use the “ColorPicker field items only” package.

2. Install it via Sitecore desktop.

3. After the installation, new custom field called “Color Picker” should be registered with the system.

To verify it, switch to “core” database and go to the following location: “/sitecore/system/Field types/Simple Types”

The “Color Picker” field should be there and should look like this:

Short user guide:

1. If the installation was successful, you can start using it.

2. Find the template you want to play with.

3. Create a field of type “Color Picker”

4. Create an item from this template.

5. Enjoy.

This shared source module has been implemented in collaboration with Artem Loboda (compent.dk).

Developed and tested on 6.4 Update-1. Expected to work with 6.3. There could be compatibility issues with earlier releases.

All the sources are published to our Shared Source Library. Thanks for the help, Jimmie :-)
http://trac.sitecore.net/ColorPicker/browser/Trunk