Hey guys,

after a couple of hours searching, testing and debugging a complete (pretty nice) international (>20 languages) solution we still experienced a (at this point) strange behaviour by Sitecore.

Imagine that:

Root
- subitem 1
- subitem 2
- subitem 3
- subitem 4
- subitem 5
- subitem 6

All these subitems have no(!) fields. And there are no proxies or any other things which can influence the performance. How long does it take to evaluate this xpath statement: ./item (the context node is the root node)?

It takes approx. 19 ms! So long for such a basic operation, wtf? (Also in the profiler view we see approx. 3000 items read)

… some random time later (after changing the icon as well ) …

Check the “Subitems sorting” field on the root item! In our case the value was “Created”, if you set it to default (or nothing) it takes 0,12 ms!

Checking the code of the “Created” method reveals the explanation: By each call of DoCompare() it compares each version as well. Now: 24 languages with 1 version and 8 subitems…. now it’s quite understandable why it took so long. Also the items count in the profile are less!

So, be careful when applying “Created” as subitems sorting on a large enviroment.

Enjoy the rest of the week.

best chris

Hey guys,

let’s get back to the blogsphere by writing again. After the sumer hole 2009, the autumn seems to start in Germany. A lot’s of stuff happened in the last time: The OMS release, Sitecore 6.1 and I’ve passed my Sitecore Trainer Exam.

Thanks again Alex, Bert, Peter and Sven.

Like in the first post of this series. I show you the different Sitecore Buttons which you know already, I guess.  

• Large Combo Button: The field “Gallery” specifies the control id of the “Menu” to display. The control is a xaml file like any other “sitecore client xaml application”. The code looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<control xmlns:def=”Definition” xmlns=”http://schemas.sitecore.net/Visual-Studio-Intellisense“>
  <Gallery.WorkflowEdit>
    <Stylesheet Key=”Gallery.WorkflowEdit”>
      body {
      height:auto;
      }
    </Stylesheet>
    <Gallery>
      <CodeBeside Type=”Sitecore.Shell.Applications.ContentManager. Galleries.WorkflowEdit.GalleryWorkflowEditForm, Sitecore.Client”/>
<Menu ID=”Options” Border=”none”/>
</Gallery>
  </Gallery.WorkflowEdit>
</control>

• Panel: The complete layout is specified in the code behind. The type field is where your <namespace + class name>,<assembly name> goes in. Here “Sitecore.Shell.Applications.ContentManager.Panels.NewPanel,Sitecore.Client”. The code is pretty long though, but the important thing is that you have to inherit the “RibbonPanel” class and override the Render method.

public class NewPanel : RibbonPanel
{
    // Methods
    public NewPanel();
    protected virtual string GetClick(Item item);
    protected static UrlString GetUrl(Item item);
    public override void Render(HtmlTextWriter output, Ribbon ribbon, Item button, CommandContext context);
    private static void RenderOptions(HtmlTextWriter output, List<InsertOption> options);
}

• Large Menu Combo Button: The Items which build your menu, are of the “menu item” template. You can pass the id of the current item by using parameters like this: “item:deletechildren(id=$Target)” (The delete children menu).

Hope I could bringt some light into the dark. I already got another idea about topics to write about, so stay tuned.

Best, Chris

Hey guys,

sorry that I didn’t write anything for a while, but I digged myself into a couple of books for my study.

The last days I worked to customize the webedit ribbon bar and added my own functionality. I really like working in the sheer ui and hopefully there come more tasks to tackle and I can write about them.

Here we go, everybody of you know the new webedit in Sitecore and the ribbon (button) above. I want to create a new strip (like “Page Editor” and “Home”) and in there I want a new chunk with a panel.

Here you see the Ribbon structure in Sitecore. It may be useful. Now, your new friend is the Sitecore Core database and the Item: /sitecore/content/Applications/Content Editor/Ribbons; there you find all the relevant items you need to create or change. In there are different folders:

• Chunks - defines all different chunks. If you want to create a new one, this is your first point.
• Contextual Ribbons - You remember the context ribbons e.g. when you create a new template, this is done here.
• Ribbons - under Default you can define the default strips you have in your normal content editor and if they are hidden by default (right click on the toolbar you see the developer and my toolbar which are hidden by default for example).
• Strips - In the image above you see that this whole thing is strip. Define it’s details and chunks here, but I get back on that later.

Unfortunately I have not that much time at the moment, so I will split up this tutorial into several parts. Check back soon to see how to connect these items and see it in action. I will also describe how to create a panel such as insert, where you can change the behaviour programmatically.

cheers chris

Hey guys,

writing xslt is some kind of special, isn’t it? As a original developer who started with php need to pay special attention to the xslt paradigm.

In my case I have a dropdown navigation with two columns after each 4 items where you need to split the current div tag into a new.

You can’t do something like this:

<xsl:if test=”position () = 4″>
</div><div class=”Submenu”>
</xsl:if>

Right?

The solution is some kind of “hack”, so only use this if you have tried to think over your code and another solution.

<xsl:variable name=”divider”>
  <![CDATA[</div><div class=”Column”>]]>
</xsl:variable>

Now you can do:

<xsl:if test=”(position() mod 4) = 0″>
  <xsl:value-of select=”$divider” disable-output-escaping=”yes”/>
</xsl:if>

Enjoy