Sunday, October 17, 2010

Sitecore 6.4 Cloning – What does it Mean?

If you want to know “what it is”, then check John West’s Blog.  John gives you a quick preview of this new powerful feature, what it does, how it compares with other Sitecore assets, etc.  The concept is not far-fetch and you may have already required or implemented it before.  It essentially allows an item to use another item’s field values.  Let’s say you have a Location page (content item) that has days/hours of operation, amenities, location name, map, address, etc.  Also, let’s say that all locations have the same hours of operation and amenities.  What cloning allows you to do is to “clone” the location content item for another location and just update the address, name, and map.  Upon rendering, you’ll see a complete page with the re-used (or shared depending on how you look at it) content values of hours of operations and amenities together with the specific values for address, name, and map.  This is all without developing any logic specific to this except for rendering the fields.  Cool, huh?

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Proud to be a Sitecore Blogger

Yup.  Besides this blog and our corporate blog, I’m now also a Sitecore blogger:

http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Best-Practice-Blogs/Marco-Tana/Posts/2010/09/Marketers-Top-Sitecore-Priorities.aspx

This may sound self-glorifying but I’m actually proud where my writing skills has taken me.  I still have the occasional grammatical errors but I consider that to be part of my personality (nice excuse, huh?).  Anyway, Sitecore is bringing together a group of Sitecore veterans to give you their (our) experiences with the product, modules, and associated technologies and practices.  It’s called the Best Practice Blogs and was recently released.  You’ll find advice and expertise on marketing, implementation, e-commerce, SEO, usability, and analytics.  There’ll be more topics too come as Sitecore gets more articles. 

I’ve read most of the posts already and very interesting ideas.  I definitely learned a thing or two.  I’m sure you will too.  I say you check it out and I’ll definitely write another one.  By the way, if you happen to read mine, leave me a message and let me know what topic you’d like me to tackle in the future (or at least rate my post).  You can suggest anything from design, technology, project management, processes, etc.  If I have some ideas to share, I’ll definitely evangelize it on my posts either here in my blog, at Roundedcube’s blog, or Sitecore’s.

Thanks again for reading.