.Sitecore

Hi, let me first introduce myself. I’m Hans co-worker of Alex and responsible for support and maintance at Lectric. Since Lars showed us the 5.3 Content editor last June I really couldn’t wait to get some hands-on experience myself. Last week we got an copy of release candidate 1. Alex already installed one on a development machine. However, this wasn’t good enough for me. I really need a fresh copy all for myself. I’m so egoistic! For a great deal my job consist of creating documents for different customers. These documents only differ in small parts with names and such. Also some documents have more or other paragraphs than others. After copy & pasting a lot I really get bored. Then a great idea struck me: why not use Sitecore 5.3 for document generation? It has a great word-like interface and it is build for Content Management. I see a Win-Win situation!

However it was more easily said then done. The installer gave me a lot more trouble then first excepted. Installing with SQL2000 and SQLExpress didn’t work. They ended the install with a SQL error resulting in the rollback of the installation. And as the install is only available as a self-extracting executable. A lot of time was wasted installing and rollbacking the installation. Some serious improvements can be made here. As the database backup failed I could still use the files installed and create a Backup of the database created by Alex. Another point of criticism are all the 2 kb little image files. They take a whole lot of time installing and de-installing. Right now I’m installing the RC by checking the mysql option. Waiting for the error popup, copying the installed files to another directory and then proceding with the rollback.

After that I restored the database files to the MSSQL server and edited the web.config to match my needs. I Had to comment out the roleManager from the web.config to make the site work. Last but not least I had to copy a valid license file. Just to be sure I gave everyone “full access” and unset the read-only flag for all the files. And then my friends, finally: Welcome to Sitecore (RC)!

After starting up the manager. I became very happy. This is a great tool! So different from sitecore 5.1 and 5.2. I don’t really have a hang yet about the keyboard control but I really like to have all options close. With former Sitecore managers you sometimes had to search long to find some options. With this now version it’s all in the menu! The developer center is pretty cool. And what’s this? A codebehind editor? In my CMS? To create C# code? Get outta here! And there’s more: an XPATH builder with live sitecore results. And a XSLT editor wichh updates the result to show live results. What more can a serieus developer want? From the first look of it the packager has had a great amount of rework. I looks good!

I won’t deny it. I was a big fan of Sitecore 4. I’m a big fan of sitecore 5.1/5.2. And it really looks like I will be a big fan of 5.3. The Sitecore system really is a system from developers for developers. And I’m really looking forward to building my first site with it! Keep up the good work guys!