PowerShell console – now compatible with EPiServer CMS 6 R2

Itâs been a while since I had a chance to do any coding… turns out leading a development division tends to not have much to do with developmentâŚ who knew?!

But Iâve finally got a moment to sit down and refresh the EPiServer PowerShell console and make it compatible with both CMS versions 5 & 6. You could technically use it before on CMS 6 but the looks of it was broken. (previous version available here)

What triggered it was a talk with Michael Sadler earlier this week. Michael is a technical consultant by day (and a musician by night) in our solutions team in London. We talked how he was doing a content audit for a client in one of the other CMSâes weâre supporting. Which really sounded like a daunting taskâŚ The content got exported as XML and then he had to write a bunch of C# code to parse it and create statistics for e.g. how many people edit the content, who created the majority of the content etcâŚ well I couldnât resist but to bragâŚ

get-childitem -recurse | Group-Object ChangedBy | 
Sort count -descending | format-table -property count, name

looks through all the pages, and counts how many articles by each author there are in the CMS. Naturally you can also do it on a sub-branch of content as well.

Iâm sorry Michael you had to go through this without PowerShellâŚ

Deployment

The plugin will detect the version of EPiServer itâs running under and will skin itself appropriately to match the CMS style.

As far as I can tell, your PowerShell scripts will be interchangeable between the versions, as far as they themselves donât touch any API thatâs undergone a breaking change.

AgainâŚ

[Download & Enjoy]

How to install?

Extract the DLL form the ZIP file into the BIN folder of your web application to install the plugin. Remove the DLL to uninstall it.

All constructive feedback appreciated!

Disclaimer â Responsibility: With great powers comes great responsibility â this tool can do a lot of harm to a lot of content in a very short time – backup your system before using the plugin! I will not be held responsible for any use of it. Test your scripts on your development server first! Test on an exact copy of production before running scripts on production content.

Disclaimer â Security: While the tool requires a membership in either the âWebAdminâ or âAdministratorsâ group, to execute, protect it with a <loaction> entry in web.config, to add another layer of security especially if your administration UI is exposed to the public. Manage your group memberships & rights responsibly!