.Sitecore

Dear journal, (The Netherlands sept 25, 2006)

As I was doing the dishes (hey! it’s 2006, men do dishes!) I was thinking of a kewl sheer application I could build into the sitecore client. But I couldn’t really think of an application I would want. There are however some issues I would like to see fixed. After working with Sitecore for years you notice some quirks that make my life more difficult then it should be. And then, as struck by lightning it came to my mind. They say sitecore is fully adaptable for your own needs because sitecore is build in sitecore. Well I don’t take statements like that for granted. I’m up for the challenge! There are a few things I wan’t to change. I’ll start by implementing the easiest one and follow along with the others. Every journey starts with the first step, I’ll see where it ends!

The things I like to change are:
Locking items for editing:
Sure you have workflow and rights management. But as a admin you can bypass both. I wan’t to be able to “lock” items. Not because I want to prohibit editing or renaming but to inform the user that he is doing something he maybe shouldn’t do. Like moving the Media Library. Or renaming/deleting items wich are linked from the web.config. It should be easy to do: creating a field in the standard template. Adjusting the pipelines to call some custom code before editing/moving/renaming/deleting an item. (SiteCore 5.3 has the ability to protect an item, which comes pretty close, however it’s not what I want. I want to be able to edit the the item and keep the lock in place. So the next time I edit the item the warning is displayed again protect/unprotect doesn’t do that)

Saving (sitecore) config items in sitecore:
One of the biggest problems we have with .NET solutions at our Supportdesk is the web.config. Only one version is saved in our SourceSafe database. Most of the time the version in sourcesafe is not consistent with the live version. Which causes problems when uploading new versions. They only thing I want to exist in the web.config are the database and pipeline/event settings. The rest should be in the database. Another reason is that I don’t want the application to restart everytime I change some setting. In my view the settings should be saved in sitecore (locked) items. This is a bit trickier, I have to subclass the Sitecore.Configuration.ConfigReader to read the settings from sitecore items.

prefilling the placeholder field:
The weakest link for me in SiteCore is the way a sublayout or rendering is coupled to a layout. When you make a typo the renderings stops and the only way to find out is having a look at the profiling output. Other problems arise when you don’t know the name of the placeholder or when the Layout is changed and the placeholder is removed or has it name changed. You can’t prevent the placeholder to be deleted or renamed. But you sure can create a proper warning. That way you know there’s a problem before the visitors of your website do. Another thing I really want to change is the following dialog:

I really would like the placeholder field to be a dropdown list with the available Placeholders in the layouts. This one is rather tricky I guess. I have to save the Placeholder names when saving a Layout or SubLayout to disk. I have to have to change to dialog the create a dropdownlist instead of a textbox and fill this dropdownlist with the appropriate values when loaded. So I have to know the context which I’m not sure I have at the point the dialog is loaded. But then again, what’s the challenge if all is easy?

The yourney starts here.