» Sitecore 6

New Sitecore 6 blog module released

Mark — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:08:38 +0000

In the last couple of months I have been working on a new blog module for Sitecore 6.2. It started as a small module just for my own educational purpose but ended up as one of the largest modules I created. The module is a complete rewritten blog module, based upon the functionality of the old 5.3 version. The new version supports inline editing, fieldeditors, webcontrols for custom themes and Windows Live Writer integration. This release includes two sample blogs. One with a standard theme and one custom theme which shows you how to use the custom webcontrols.

List of features

Windows Live Writer integration (MetaWeblog API)
Full frontend (inline) editing
Webedit ribbon (with fieldeditors)
CSS based themes
Custom themes possible (one demo included)
Custom webcontrols (with inline editing)
Comments
Tagging and a tagcloud
RSS Feeds

At this moment the module in still in betá, and I would like to hear your feedback. You can use the comments or just send me a email (mark at evident.nl). When you encounter problems, found a bug or have any other kind of feedback please let me know and I will try to reply as soon as possible.

You can find the installation package and sources on the Shared Source environment.

Embedding video in Sitecore items

Mark — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:26:33 +0000

These days streaming video on the web is quite popular. In almost every project we do at Evident Interactive the customer wants to embed video in content items. Off course they can do that by copy-pasting the embedding code in a Sitecore field or in the rich-text editor. But that is not the most user-friendly method. I thought it would be nice if an end-user could just copy-paste the url of the page and let an custom control do the rest. So I created a custom field, webcontrol, some xsl extensions an a addition to the flashmanager. Let’s say that we want to embed this video from YouTube. I go to the content editor and paste the url in a field of the type “Video Embed”.

When I want to double check if I pasted the correct url I can click preview. A popup appears with the embedded video.

Then I can save my item and publish it to the web database. The only thing saved in Sitecore is the url to the page containing the video.

But sometimes you want to embed video in to an rich text field. For this I wrote an extension for the flashmanager. It works the same as the custom field, the only thing different is you get a preview inside the tab and the embed code will be copied to to rich-text editor value.

To show my video in the frontend of the site I need to add an custom control to my layout or sublayout. The custom control is included in the package.

You need to add a page directive to your layout or sublayout

<%@ Register TagPrefix="video" Namespace="Sitecore.SharedSource.VideoEmbed" Assembly="VideoEmbed" %>

Then you can add the custom control. You can set the height and width of the embed code. When those are left blank a default size of 240 for the height and 320 for the width will be used.

And here is the result of the control

At the moment the solution works for YouTube, Vimeo and Google Video (international and dutch version). I will contribute this to the Shared Source section of Sitecore as soon as Jimmie is back from holiday and can give me access.

Using profile with the Rich Text Editor

Mark — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:36:39 +0000

Regularly I see topics on the SDN5 forums where people ask if it is possible to use a custom Rich Text editor. Wll, yes it is. You can use so called profiles with the Rich Text editor. These profiles are stored in the Core database under /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/. There are some default pre-configurated profile which you van duplicate and customize to your own needs.

To use these profile you need to set the source value of an rich text field in your template.

Sitecore 6 released

Mark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:08:01 +0000

Yesterday the people at Sitecore released the new version of their CMS. Sitecore 6 (previously called “Crestone”) has lots of improvements for either the end user as for dsevelopers.

A few improvements are:

Inline editing for editors
.Net 2.0 Memebership support
New and faster Content Editor
New data types
The new Page editor

and much, much more.

For a complete list the documentation team has released an “What’s New” document. You can find it on SDN5 here

More information involving enhancements can be find at the documentation are of SDN5.