Shared source in October

 

In October we launched two new modules to the Shared Source Library, the Layout Manager and the Insert Sitecore Media.

Layout Manager

The layout Manager was created by contributor Paul Martin and is a tool that allows you to view an item’s assigned layouts, sub layouts and renderings in the context of its placeholder tree. The module also contains a “Complete Placeholder’s Reference” which provides a quick reference for all placeholders contained by layouts or sub layouts on your site.

You can find the project room here where you can download the package as well as the source and read about the steps you need to perform in order to get started.

SIP modules section on shared source library

With the addition of the Insert Sitecore Media module we have started a section on the Shared Source library for modules that are available for SIP.

Insert Sitecore Media

The first module in the SIP section enables “insert Sitecore media” in the rich text editor on a SIP installation on frontend editing.

The project room is available here where you can download the package, read the documentation and if you want to make some changes to the modules the source is easily downloaded with an SVN client.

Sitecore Utilities

Although not released in October I still want to mention the module Sitecore Utilities. It was developed for the shared source modules contest held by the Australian User group and won.

The tool adds a new section to the Content Editor with an unpublish button, some sorting methods and a button to clear server cache.

If you want to check out this module you can visit the project room here where you can download the package and the documentation for it as well.

An update from the Sitecore Shared Source Library

Since my last posts the Sitecore Shared Source Library has grown by 9 modules and thought I should mention them here for people who don’t regular check the list at http://trac.sitecore.net/Index.

Sitecore Stager

The Sitecore Stager utility allows partially clearing Sitecore caches on content delivery servers in web farm environments. This can notably improve performance when publishing small amounts of changes to heavily loaded production Sitecore servers.

There is written an extensive documentation on how to get the Sitecore Stager up and running on your site, it is available on the project room which can be found here a long with the packages you need to install.

The Sitecore Stager module was created by Alexey Romaniuha from Sitecore Ukraine

Google Maps module

The Sitecore Google Maps module is an integration of the Google Maps API with Sitecore. With it you can easily add a map to your site and add pointers, polygons and lines.

You can find the project room for the module here where you can download the Sitecore package as well as the documentation for it.

The module was created by Tim Ward from Sitecore Australia, you can read his blog here and he also has a video on the Google Maps module here.

Item Naming Rules

The ItemNamingRules project provides conditions and actions for the rules engine to automate item name conventions. You can use the ItemNamingRules project to apply different item naming rules in different branches of the content tree.

The project room can be found here where you can download the source and read the documentation on how to configure your own conditions.

The module was created by John West from Sitecore U.S.A. he is blogging here.

External Links Tracker

This module extends Sitecore OMS analytics capabilities, allowing to track the external link click.

The current version of the module uses it’s own report to show most popular links, as well as utilizes existing Session reports, showing more detailed user activity.

The project room is available here where you can download the Sitecore package and start using the report.

The External Links Tracker was created by Alexander Doroshenko from Sitecore Ukraine.

Multimedia Field

The multimedia Field module allows you to easily insert a video on your site by entering the Page Editor and like changing an image you just point to an uploaded video.

The module support various formats that you can view on the modules project room here where you will also find the package as well as the source for the module. There was also created a video review available on YouTube, you can find the link here.

The module was created by Anton Samarskyy from Sitecore Ukraine.

Video Embed

Like the Multimedia Field the Video Embed module also gives you the possibility of adding video to your site it is just handled in a different way. The Video Embed module is added to your template as a video field where you simply paste the URL of the Video you want to display and you are also given a preview of it. Then add to lines to your layout or sub layout to display the video on your site. The modules project room can be found here where you can download the package and read the documentation on how to get started.

The module was created by Mark van Aalst who is blogging here.

SitemapXML

The SitemapXML module allows you to index your site according to sitemaps.org with a little configuration and then submits the generated result to the configured search engines. OOB the module sends its schema to Google, Live search and Yahoo. You can find the modules project room here where you can download the package as well as the source.

Page Rate

The Page Rate module allows you to rate your photos, text or whatever you can think of by adding a control on your site and then view the results in a report in Sitecore Analytics.

The modules project room can be found here where you can find the package and read the documentation.

Review

The Review module makes it possible to submit a page review and in Sitecore Analytics you can see a report of all available reviews on your site.

You can download the package using this link and read the documentation for the module as well.

So now the Shared Source Library has a 116 modules, so maybe for your next site you might be able to find a useful module that you could use OOB or download the source and configure it to your liking.

Dynamic Flash for marketers module and latest modules

Before I went on vacation we released a number of new Sitecore shared source modules.

Dynamic flash for marketers

If you have seen the Nicam demo site, you have probably seen the flash rotator on the front page. In order to make this into a shared source module, we thought that is what somewhat limited in how you could configure it.

So the first feature it should have was the ability to display more than three images and it could be nice if you in the Page Editor could edit the text for the images, so that in edit mode you could use the buttons to go back and forth between the images to do your editing.

Lars Pedersen, the Flash master who took the original flash and added a whole list of settings that you could configure from within Sitecore. Lars is twittering here. You can read more about these settings on the modules project room which can be found here along with the package to download which contain the source for the flash as well as the XSLT renderings Lars Nielsen assisted me with. Lars Nielsen is blogging here.

 

Sitecore Language Translator

A cool module that integrates into the Content editor and allows you to translate your text to any language supported by Google Translate. The module was created by Tim Ward from Sitecore Australia, he is blogging here.

You can download the package here at the modules Trac project room, where you find the documentation and the source as well.

Sitecore and YAF(Yet Another Forum) integration

Sitecore now has an integration to Yet Another forum the popular .Net based application, developed by Brian Pedersen who is blogging here created three project rooms for the Sitecore shared source library dedicated to the integration and the ability for single sign-on, so that your login for Sitecore can be used for YAF.

The three project rooms for the Sitecore and YAF integration can be found here for the Sitecore integration project room, here for the YAFIntegration and here for the YAF Single Sign-on project room.

Community Server Integration

There is now also a module that provides you with an integration between Sitecore and Community Server. Like YAF this integration also allows Sitecore users to access with their account Community Server’s content as well as allowing the Community Server’s users access to the Sitecore content. The module was created by Andrey Kovalenko from Sitecore Ukraine.

The project room for the module can be found here where you can download the packages you need in your Sitecore and Community Server installation as well as some examples on how to get started.

Rendering templates for the Image Gallery

We recently upgraded the shared source Image Gallery module for Sitecore 6.1 because the customized properties window that was developed no longer functioned because of Sitecore 6.1 has is using a different properties window more suited for the analytics.

The fix however was very simple and it even allowed us to remove all the code that was used to create the customized properties window by using something new to Sitecore 6.1 called Rendering Parameters Templates. John West have written a post on explaining how it is different from the old properties window. You can read the post here.

I will continue with how it was used for the image gallery module and the first thing we could do was to remove the IGParameters2.xml sheer UI file and the IGParameters2.cs that took the four parameters we needed for the image gallery.

With Sitecore 6.1 we could discard all this and instead create a template derived from the System/Layout/Rendering Parameters/Standard Rendering Parameters Template and enter the four parameters.

Sitecore then stores these values in the control properties dialog in the layout details of the item.

 

This template do the same as the sheer UI that was created in the previous version of the Image gallery module and when we add it through the page editor the new properties window now looks like this.

I think that it is a pretty cool feature, that for this module allowed me to leave out a lot of sheer UI code and replacing it was as easy as to create a new template in the Template manager.

You can download the latest package from the Image Gallery project room, which can be found here and there is also a video review that can be viewed here.

Sitecore Shared source is growing

Seeing that it is a long time since my last post, I thought that I should write a post telling about all the modules that got added since my last post to the Shared source library and that I also started making short video review of the modules, so I will also touch on that subject and let you know where you can find them if you are interested.

Quick Launch Toolbar

This module gives you quick access to your most used Sitecore applications from your toolbar like you have in Windows.

You can visit the project room here to see how to install and add your most used applications to the toolbar.

Image Gallery

The image gallery module can be found here with instructions on how to add it to your site. It uses some Silverlight that was created by Vertigo and then adapted by Lars Nielsen to work with the media library in Sitecore, so that each folder is an album and then from the Page Editor you can upload more images so you won’t have to go into the client to do so.

Xsl code behind

This module created by Thomas Eldblom from Pentia allows you to add code behind files to your XSLT files in the same way that you would an ASP.NET page. You can visit the project room here and to get a more thorough insight into why you need this module, you can start with the first of three blog post on the subject here.

Index Viewer

The index viewer uses the Lucene search engine to open an index defined in the web.config file, without changes databases. It was created by Jens Mikkelsen that is blogging here along side Thomas Eldblom. You can also visit the module project room here to learn more about it and the place to download it.

RSS Reader

The reader allows you to aggregate RSS feeds and display them on your web site. It was develop by Alenka Caserman and you can visit the project room here and she is blogging here.

Presentation Usage Reporter

The presentation Usage Reporter or PUR for short allows developers to run a report that will find all the content items and data template’s standard values which the use the selected presentation component.

If you want to learn more about this module or just want to download it, you can visit the project room here.

PCheX

This is a very cool module that when installed gives you a package checker when you are creating them in the package designer. Like for instance you add in item, it checks to see if you remembered the template and also reminding you to check if you remembered your assembly and layouts.

If you want to learn more about the PCheX or just want to get your hands on the package the project room can be found here.

 

We have also started a new section in our index page called Link Management, that contains C# files that you can include in your solution to give you some functionality in the regards of link management, like the Link Provider that can convert links to lowercase and include the trailing slash character (“/”) when possible and the Media URL Transformer can convert media URLs in the rich text editor to lowercase and it has other features as well and you can download the two modules here and here. The modules was created by John West who is blogging here.

The product catalogue module got upgraded by Dmitry Vasilinenko to Sitecore 6 and if you have any request to new features or fixes you can mail them to Dmitry or post them on the shared source forum. You can visit the product catalogue project room here and Dmitry is also blogging here.

Lucene search

The search box and result page from the starter kit got extracted so that by installing a simple module you can add a search box and result page to your own site. On the project room you can see what it is currently indexing and how to extend your search to include other fields.

and go to index to see the full list of modules that is growing by the month

Shared source video reviews

I started this post by mentioning that I started creating video reviews of the shared source modules and so for the videos for the Image Gallery, Lucene search, Advanced System Reporter and the Quick Launch Toolbar. If you are interested to view these they are available on YouTube here.

So as you can see a lot of cool shared source modules for Sitecore have been created within a short while and I am sure that there are more on the way and if you have a module that you would like to share with the rest of the Sitecore community, drop me a mail and I will set you up with a project room.

Free, Shared and the all the new modules

This month a number of things has happened, before going into the new modules I want to talk about the change for the free modules. For those of you who didn’t read the post on the shared source forum about the free modules to shared source, here is a short recap.

The free modules GoTo Item, Media conversion tool, Sitecore Plus and the External Link checker has been moved to the shared source library. They have all gotten their own project room and seeing that it is now shared, the source code is now available for download if you want to modify it to suit your solution. If you want to read the full post on SDN you can find the link here.

Some of the features from those modules is obsolete for Sitecore 6, meaning that they are included in the product. One of those features that is not, is the Auto doc and I have been hearing that people want that for Sitecore 6 as well. So we have split the Auto doc from the Plus module, giving it a project room of its own and upgraded it to Sitecore 6. You can find the project room here.

A new module coming from Sitecore is the Unused Media Manager, a module that can scan your installation and remove the unused media. To learn more about the module visit the project room here and it is of course for Sitecore 6.

From outside Sitecore we have a module from Alistair Deneys, the Editor line numbers module a module that he first told the world about on his blog and I then asked him if he didn’t want to have it as a shared source module, hoping that if it was placed on SDN people who don’t necessarily read his blog will still get to know about it. The module is already available on the shared source library under Sitecore customizations. You can read more about his doings on his blog by using this link. He is also the guy behind Revolver a command line tool for Sitecore, which you can read more about on his blog.

Sitecore, Shared Source and beyond

During the last four months, a lot have been going on. We started the Shared Source initiative and launched Sitecore version 6. Also the forums on SDN have really been seeing the activity, in July the forum posts where up to a staggering 10171 posts in total and that is almost 500 post in July alone, with the forum members climbing to almost 3000.

Also the Shared source forum that got started in April have been well visited with questions about the modules, be it problems or a request to upgrade one of the more popular modules. Seeing the Blog module, RSS and the Multiple Sites Manager upgraded as well as the AdRotator and the Meta-tags module and the list should expand as we get request to upgrade them. Developers are of course more than welcome to contribute to the modules by upgrading them or adding new features.

In the last four months we have added ten new shared source modules to the list not including the Wizard and Extranet from the Free modules section. Some of the latest additions to the list is the extensive Domain objects by Mark Cassidy, a tool for Sitecore developers that is designed to make tasks related to data and data storage easier.

This approach should make it possible to use the same code across different Sitecore versions.

Another newly added module is the Advanced System Reporter, that allows you to generate reports of all sorts. An example is having all the locked items for all users.

Also a module that keeps getting bigger is the Sitecore Field types module, that gives you a Carousel, a Slider and a Visual list to use as a graphical representation of a list in Sitecore instead of the usual plain list that comes as default.

 

The list of shared source keeps expanding and there seems to be much excitement around the latest release of Sitecore with the new security model and all the new in-line editing. Who knows where this might lead.

Modules for Sitecore 6

In my last post I mentioned some of the larger modules that we have upgraded to Sitecore 6 along with  new ones like the extensive Domain Objects module by Mark Cassidy.

Since then other modules have been upgraded as well, some needed more work than others but seeing that the framework hasn’t changed all that much since the previous version, most will work without any or minor changes to them. The AdRotator just needed some code removed too and compiled against the latest Sitecore.Kernel.dll and it was working. The same goes for the Meta-tags module.

The Multiple Sites Manager needed a minor change to one of the files and a repackaging to work with version 6 but modules like the Wiki worked without any changes made to it. Some of the smaller modules will probably also work without any modifications and that is why I am concentrating on the larger modules.

So seeing that the modules are shared source there is no stopping you to download it and make the changes that it need in order to work with the Sitecore 6 and then you are off course welcome to commit those changes to its project room.

Shared Source modules ready for Sitecore 6

Now that Crestone has successfully shipped here June 30. there are now already some Shared Source modules that work on Crestone.

We have updated some of the popular modules for Sitecore 5.3 to 6. One of these modules are the RSS Module, not only does it work for Sitecore 6 there is also added support for iTunes with the ability to add iTunes-specific channel and item level attributes, such as iTunes:author. Another feature that was added is the ability to use podcasting.

The Blog module is hot in its heels and should be released to its Trac project room in the near future, I just want to polish it and looking into adding a tag cloud. So hopefully it won’t be to long.

We also welcome a list of new modules that will find a place on SDN very soon. The FieldTypes module provides additional field types for the Sitecore client, like the Carousel, Slider and the Visual List. To view examples of all of these features visit its project room at http://trac.sitecore.net/FieldTypes which have a description and images on how these work.

The Domain Objects by Mark Cassidy is an efficiency tool that let´s Sitecore developers work more productively by giving a cleaner interface between the business and Sitecore domain. It should also help with maintenance and transitions between versions. You can read more about this extensive module on the Trac project room http://trac.sitecore.net/DomainObjects where the author has created documentation on getting started and working smarter with Sitecore, packages for versions 5.3 and 6.0 and the source code available if you want to contribute to his work.

Building a Sitecore package

In addition to having guidelines on what information and what files a package should contain, we would like to encourage developers to start building packages as described under the “How to build the source code for Sitecore” located under the How to contribute section.

Contributors may need source and items

The strategy for Sitecore Shared Source contributors is to move physical files, that remains under source control into the SVN server, giving the benefits that comes with a traditional source control (such as version control, source comparison etc.). Items, however, cannot be checked into traditional source control and must be maintained through other means. Sitecore best practices prescribes that content items (content, templates, masters), and items referring to physical files (layouts, XSLT files) should be maintained in a Sitecore package.

This allows developers to check out their project files using SVN agents (e.g. Tortoise SVN, command line, or directly from Visual Studio). As they check out the files, they will also check out a Sitecore package containing the items for the project. All they need to do, if they want to contribute, is to install the package, and maintain it afterwards.

The name of the package belonging to the project should be named [Projectname]Items, e.g. MyProjectItems.zip.

End user developers may just need the module, not the source

As some developers may not want to get the actual source files, but rather use the packaged version of the module with the compiled result, Sitecore best practices for Shared Source contribution prescribes those contributors should compile a Sitecore package with such files only.

The contents of this package should, – just as the above package, contain content items and items referring to physical files. However, as developers will not be using SVN, executables and related files should also be held within the package (e.g. aspx pages, web user controls and the binaries that supplies code for these front end pages).

The name of the package for pure module usage should be named [Projectname]WithoutSource, e.g. MyProjectWithoutSource.zip.

To visit the example project to read more click here to go to the project room.

We also have an addition to the list of modules, Alex de Groot has contributed with a module called Sitecore Translation which can be found under modules on SDN or simple visit the project room here.

Alex is also blogging about Sitecore, you can read his blog here.

If you think that there is a part of contributing to the shared source initiative that isn’t covered well enough, please let me know and I will see what I can do.