Some time ago, one of our clients expressed a need to use modal dialogs to display biographical information about the members of their governance committee.  The expected end result was to produce a modal dialog (a kind of pseudo-popup, often referred to as a “lightbox”) whenever certain links are clicked.  The dialog needed to display text in the title bar and rich text content in the dialog window’s body. More...

I was reviewing some code for a past client with a colleague of mine recently, and they became very excited about one particular feature. We had customized the Hyperlink Manager so that it would automatically include a Google Analytics tracking event when the link was rendered – allowing the client to maintain an extensive analytics store when transferring to a Sitecore-based site. More...

One of my cohorts recently posed a great question: How hard would it be to customize the hyperlink manager dialog in Sitecore’s rich text editor?  While there is a well established protocol for creating a completely custom dialog, customizing one of the built-in dialogs was not something I had seen before.  Of course, I couldn’t let the question go unanswered. More...

When creating content within Sitecore, or any CMS for that matter, you would like to view the content exactly how it will appear on the live site. Sitecore allows you to specify a CSS file to load into the RadEditor. This lets you view the styles in Design mode as they would appear on the published site and also populates the Apply CSS Class dropdown list with available CSS classes.  Unfortunately, the standard behavior only allows a single style sheet and any class defined within it will be made available in the class dropdown. Often times this is less than ideal. Frequently, certain pages or elements of a page have special style rules that are not shared across the whole site. In this post we will show how to extend Sitecore to allow you to specify a style sheet and the classes available in the Class dropdown as part of the editor profile. More...

A recent Sitecore implementation required the retrieval and display of knowledge base articles from a 3rd party vendor. In another word: (pause for dramatic effect) Integration. An innocuous word in and of itself, but with seemingly infinite definitions and a complexity belying it's singularity. Fortunately, there are a number of avenues available to Sitecore developers when determining the best approach for weaving external data into the fabric of a website. Depending on requirements, you may find yourself using data providers, custom item editors, wildcard items, data importing, magic or some other technique. More...