The Aware Blog

Modal Windows and Sitecore - How to Give Content Authors More Flexibility

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:14:00 -0500

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.

Sitecore DMS Demystified - 6 Must Have Marketing Features

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:28:00 -0500

Sitecore CEP, or Consumer Engagement Platform for the uninitiated, is the combination of Sitecore’s award winning Content Management System with their new Digital Marketing System (DMS). When used together, the two tools provide online marketers with a 360-degree view of a web visitor’s experience. The amazing new capabilities help to create a deeper level of user engagement to improve your understanding of your customers'. Tracking how that increased engagement impacts site performance will lead to better conversion rates thereby creating more value for your organization.

Customizing Sitecore’s Hyperlink Manager to Track “OnClick” Events

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:07:00 -0500

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.

Sitecore Names Three “Awarians” to the 2011 Sitecore Most Valuable Professional (MVP) List

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:38:00 -0500

Aware is proud to announce Eric Nordberg (Solution Architect), Jason Hedlund (VP of Technology) and Ben Golden (Solution Architect) have been selected and honored with a Sitecore Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award. MVP nominees are evaluated by a special Sitecore panel for their technical expertise and voluntary community involvement in the areas of general technical advocacy, input via blogs and forums and content development over the past year. Aware received three out of the fifty-two MVPs named for 2011.

Ask Better Questions to Hire the Best Sitecore Partner

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:30:00 -0500

It can be a challenge. You’re about to begin a new project implementing Sitecore CMS and you’re interviewing potential Sitecore certified partners to help you.

So, where do you begin? How can you quickly cut through the sales speak, slick presentations and endless promises to arrive at the right partner for you and your unique project?

6 Ways to Optimize Your Sitecore Experience Today

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:55:00 -0500

Just beginning to plan a project using Sitecore? Already completed a Sitecore implementation? Ready to leverage Sitecore’s more advanced tool set (DMS)?

No matter what stage you’re in, there are ways to optimize your Sitecore experience.

Aware Awarded Site of The Year by Sitecore

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:30:00 -0500

Aware’s client, Ripon Athletic RiponAthletic.com, is named Sitecore’s North American Site of the Year for “Best Retail, Wholesale and Consumer Site”.

Sitecore Awards Aware Expert Level Certification in All Four Partner Specialization Categories

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:23:00 -0500

Aware is proud to announce certification in all four categories of the Sitecore Partner Specializations program.

Sitecore Hosting Architecture Considerations – How to determine the environment that best suits your needs - An interview with Eric Nordberg.

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:15:00 -0600

I recently sat down with Eric Nordberg, one of Aware’s Solution Architects. Eric wrote a blog post for us titled, “Sitecore Hosting Architecture Considerations.”

Sitecore Hosting Architecture Considerations – Consider the “why” and not just the “how.” - An interview with Eric Nordberg.

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:06:00 -0600

I recently sat down with Eric Nordberg, one of Aware’s Solution Architects. Eric wrote a blog post for us titled, “Sitecore Hosting Architecture Considerations.” This post has been well received and has consistently been one of our most popular posts on AwareWeb.com.

Customizing Sitecore’s Rich Text Editor Dialogs [video interview]

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:23:00 -0500

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.

Profile Specific Style Sheets

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:31:00 -0500

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.

Sitecore Multilingual Solution Considerations

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:18:00 -0500

At Dreamcore North America 2011, I attended a presentation by Alex Shyba titled "Building Successful and Efficient Multilingual Solutions with Sitecore". Overall, the presentation was great and Alex is to be commended for the topics he highlighted. About 1/4 (or 1 div 4 for you xsl gurus) of the way into the presentation Alex started mentioning architecture and strategy considerations and I couldn't help but notice a number of nodding heads and "light bulb" moments around the room. As Alex alluded, an effective multilingual strategy is not as simple as turning a key (nor should it be). Consequently, my goal with this post is to outline a number of key considerations you may need to address when implementing a multilingual solution.

Sitecore Rules Engine - Managing Top Level Navigation Inclusion

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:02:00 -0500

At Dreamcore North America, I was excited to see how Sitecore is applying the Rules Engine to introduce conditional logic. Specifically, they demoed it in combination with DMS (digital marketing system – aka OMS v2) to handle personalization. This was ridiculously easy in the Sitecore 6.5 Page Editor. Also, it was used for mobile browser detection in the Mobile Device Detector shared source module.

Insights on Sitecore 6-5 previewed at Dreamcore

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:52:00 -0500

Wow, what a great couple of days at Sitecore’s Dreamcore 2011 in Boston, where many great topics were discussed, new features were unveiled and great conversations were had. As Deb alluded to in a previous post, Sitecore’s new Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) will take how you interact with your site visitors to a whole new level. There are some very exciting things on the horizon!

Sitecore Announces Its Customer Engagement Platform at Dreamcore

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:42:00 -0500

Digital intimacy – A True Attempt at Managing the Customer Experience

Michael Seifert , Co-Founder and CEO of Sitecore, kicked off today’s Dreamcore conference with the announcement of Sitecore’s next generation platform, the Customer Engagement Platform, this morning during Dreamcore’s keynote address. Michael says “This is the beginning of a journey down the road of digital intimacy”. The platform is an attempt to truly bridge the gap between the online and offline customer. The fully baked platform promises to remove the complex technology barriers that exist today through traditionally disconnected systems.

Aware knew of the pending launch and was afforded a sneak peek at the platform weeks back during technical preview. The announcement gave way to a day chock-full of sessions centered around the next generation release and with it; a few new acronyms were born.

So, let’s break it down.

Sitecore Hosting Architecture Considerations

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:17:00 -0500

There are many considerations when planning a Sitecore hosting architecture. In this post, we will discuss the key concepts behind planning and creating an effective and scalable Sitecore environment.

Integrating External Data Using Sitecore Wildcard Items and Temporary Items

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:46:00 -0500

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.

Aware Awarded 2nd MVP

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:39:00 -0600

It's official. Aware is proud to announce our 2nd Sitecore Most Valuable Professional (MVP) designation. Congratulations Adam!

Sitecore and SEO – Seven Low Cost, Quick and Must Do Tasks

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:47:00 -0600

There’s a plethora of so called experts blogging, tweeting and chatting on everything web from soup to nuts. I have a select few experts that I loyally follow, however, and one such person is Jill Whalen, a true SEO expert.

I’ve been a loyal subscriber and reader of her SEO newsletter, High Rankings Advisor, for over seven years. The only subscription I’ve held onto longer is my local newspaper. I can’t seem to shake the paper version just yet, plus its make good fire starter. Jill has practical, no nonsense and a good old fashioned approach to SEO. She’s witty and her newsletter is a fun read.

Sitecore Data Access – Some Extension Methods

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:58:00 -0500

Recently, I had a client that did not wish to use the Page Editing controls provided by Sitecore. They were only interested in the Content Editor. This greatly simplified our data access needs. We were able to grab field data and not worry about field names, etc…

Once field render controls were not needed, our CMS access scenarios were VERY simple and VERY repetitive (for example, getting the value of text field X). To meet this need, we created a set of simple extension methods.

Sitecore Advanced Topics – An Example Configuration Plan

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:20:00 -0500

There are some configuration concepts for Sitecore that require some planning. This is especially true for larger environments.

Below are parts of the planning document we created for a recent client. The site being considered here is characterized by the following: staged environments (development, QA, production), multiple content delivery servers in QA and production, a large content authoring team, all running Sitecore 6.1.

An early version of this plan was discussed with a contact in Sitecore USA. His feedback has been applied to this document. Sitecore was very helpful, even providing code samples for some of our needs.

Sitecore Massive - Should we wait?

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:07:00 -0500

After attending the Sitecore roadmap session in Boston a few weeks back, I've been wondering if we should recommend to our clients whether they should wait until the new version comes out? There are many exciting new possibilities that the new software provides. Mainly, these include unstructured content and lots of it. Along with faster database performance, and we've suddenly got a CMS that can truly scale to the largest of sites, yet have all the modern day features that most of the CMS granddaddies don't have.

Presentation Inversion of Control (part 2)

Tue, 25 May 2010 09:08:00 -0500

In my previous post, I introduced the concept of presentation inversion of control. In this post, I will show a few ways that this concept can be implemented.

Inline Item List Field

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:26:00 -0500

The Problem (note: this is not a character on MTV's Jersey Shore)

Content Author: "Why do I have to create [page-related item] in some obscure location before adding it to a page?"
Developer: "Because, [page-related item] is not actually "part" of the page, it's simply referenced by a field in your page item and rendered at runtime according to the presentation settings we've established for your page item."

Content Author (eyes glazed over): "What? So I always have to remember to go to this other place in the content tree to create [page-related item] before I can add it to the page? I thought Sitecore was supposed to make my life easier as a content author? Grumble grumble..."
Developer: "Sorry, that's just how the Sitecore authoring tools work."

Does that conversation sound familiar? If so, you're in luck, there is now a way to change the conversation or avoid it altogether! The Inline Item List field aims to empower content authors with the ability to create/edit/delete related items without leaving the item they're currently editing.

Presentation Inversion of Control (part 1)

Thu, 06 May 2010 22:32:00 -0500

I recently had the honor of speaking at Dreamcore North America. Due to time constraints, I had to run through the details pretty quickly. In this series, I will go into the topic in more depth than I could in the 15 minutes I had for the Dreamcore presentation.