Getting Started with Sitecore DMS

There is a lot of buzz about Sitecore DMS and Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform. A lot of people are looking for good tips, tricks and resources on both.

First of all I would like to point out that John West has a brief but detailed section describing some of the terms and fundamental concepts on DMS in his book Professional Sitecore Development.

After reading this section, I recommend checking out the article Sitecore DMS - Where to Start Part 1. This will help you with getting started.

Next I suggest this article that talks about the Integrated-Customer-Experience

Sitecore also offers the following training DMS Fundamentals for Marketers. This one is in Toronto on July 27, 2012 but if you look at the training section there are other dates and other cities where the training is offered.

After that I suggest logging into sdn and checking out some of the valuable references there.

If you have any further articles you would recommend, tips, tricks, pitfalls to avoid related to getting started with Sitecore DMS or Sitecore in general, please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com and I will post them here.

Sitecore MVC the topic of latest Sitecore Virtual User Group July 18

The Sitecore Virtual User Group on July 18, 2012 is on Sitecore MVC this time.

I am looking forward to this presentation. MVC is a hot topic and now that it is part of Sitecore in the 6.5.1 release this is very exciting.

You can register here for the Sitecore Virtual User Group.

In case you missed this awesome presentation by David Morrison, he has posted it on
YouTube

New Dynamics CRM Blog

For those Guild Members who are looking at Dynamics CRM or are looking at revolutionary and out of the box ways of getting the most out of it, there is a new blog starting up that will be providing a wealth of information on just those topics.

The Dynamics CRM Unleashed Blog is written by someone with hands on experience working with large scale and cloud based CRM.

I know I will be reading it on a regular basis, so I thought I would pass it on to you as well.

For now, here is an article I found from Alex de Groot on Sitecore and CRM Integration using Web Forms for Marketers. Check out his article: Sitecore, Webforms for Marketers, OMS and Dynamics CRM Campaign integration for more details.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the Guild please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Sitecore and Document Oriented Databases

I recently came across this article on Making Sitecore faster with MongoDB. I tried it out on one of or development servers and for text based content items it worked fine for me. I am having issues when I try to upload a Media Library image but that may just be configuration. If you have run into this or have any ideas why it is not uploading, please email me or comment on this post for what I am doing wrong.

Trying this out started me thinking about MongoDB vs other document oriented database.
According to this article on Initial Thoughts on Ravendb. Rumor has it that Sitecore 7.0 will support RavenDB.

Has anyone been playing with RavenDB and Sitecore?

Someone recently tweeted an article on massive. Does anyone have any more information on it.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources that regarding Sitecore and Document Oriented Databases please comment on this post or email sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Slow Page Load and Missing Placeholders and Properly hiding SubLayouts

Sometimes when developing a page, you need to remove a sub-layout from a page temporarily.  It is very tempting to rename the placeholder to a non-existing placeholder sometimes simply putting an x or zzz on the end.  This will work to hide the items but you will get a performance penalty of 1.6 ms.

A better way to do this is simply clear the Placeholder field.  When rendering Sitecore will skip sub-layouts where the placeholder field is empty but if you place anything in the placeholder field then Sitecore must look in the layout or sub-layouts for the placeholder.  

If this does not solve your issue with the page loading then the other option is the Sitecore Debug.

If you login to the Sitecore Admin in Desktop view you will see a Debug menu option in the Sitecore Menu.

Clicking on it will open the site in debug mode.  Navigate to the slow page.  Once it loads scroll down and you will see the breakdown of components loading.  As well if you scroll down further you will see a trace.  Sometimes you will see warnings in the trace and this may solve your problem.  This is how I found and solved the missing placeholder issue.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com

The First Sitecore Development book scheduled for release May 29, 2012

As a Sitecore Developer I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Professional Sitecore Development By John West especially after seeing the following in the Amazon description.

• Addresses installing and configuring Sitecore.
• Touches on some of the more advanced features of Sitecore, including other APIs, pipelines, and configuration files

Once you have your own copy I would love to hear comments on parts of the book that helped you as they may direct others that have similar needs.

While we wait for the book release please check out his blog at John West - Sitecore Blog there is a lot of really useful information.

Toronto Sitecore Technical User Group is Meeting May 30, 2012

These user group meetings are great places to meet others working with Sitecore and to learn some new things
as well.

Here are the details:

Toronto Sitecore Technical User Group - May 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM (ET)
Toronto, Ontario

Click here to register.  Look forward to seeing you there.