Recently the Sitecore PowerShell Team has been reflecting on the progress of the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) module. We appreciate all the feedback and contributions from the community. Without the many great people in the community, the module just wouldn’t be where it is today. The team is proud of the accomplishments for a module developed purely by the community with no formal Sitecore support.

The new year has revealed some exciting news out on the Marketplace for SPE.

• 30 recommendations as of March 1st, 2015.
• Appears on the Most Recommended list on the Marketplace home page.
• Just last night it has also appeared on the Most Downloaded list on the Marketplace!
• 16 ratings – average 5 stars!

The community is vocal!

If there is anything worth mentioning about the module it IS the amazing community!

From what we could find between all of us we have created over 90 articles and videos about the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions.

Together we?ve talked about he module at least at 3 conferences (both times times Sitecore Virtual User Summit was organized and again on Sitecore SUGCON)  and a number of  times on various Sitecore User Groups. There is plenty of material on YouTube when you search for Sitecore PowerShell. Especially interesting is the 9 episodes mini series on the module usage by Michael West and a comprehensive summary of the module capability by Michael Reynolds. The number of YouTube entries about SPE is now round 15 videos.

And you?re hungry for content!

Our community content reference page have been visited 9722 times over the past year with the number gradually growing to 1343 page views last month alone.

You?re visiting us mostly from United States, United Kingdom and India. Read the rest of this article »

Since we’ve seen some interest from developers wanting to join the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions team, I thought it might be worth documenting how my development environment is put together to allow for easier on-boarding of new members (Yes, we’re hiring! No, we can’t pay you ;) ). Maybe you just want to compile it yourself to make sure we’re not up to no good, or just plain see inside and play with it…

First of all you need to have Sitecore installed somewhere (obviously). For the purpose of examples I’ll assume your instance is located at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Sitecore8\ and has the 3 standard folders Data, Databases and Website in them as it normally has. For that very same reason I’ll also assume that your Sitecore PowerShell Extensions project folder is located at C:\Projects\SitecorePowerShell\

1) Seed your Sitecore instance

First step that I always perform when I setup a new environment is to seed the Sitecore instance with the items required which is best done by installing the latest release of PowerShell Extensions.

2) Set up Sitecore SPE folders to use the latest files you’re working on

Since we’re likely to modify the assets like JavaScript, styles or XML Controls I want those to be automatically synchronized with changes I do in C:\Projects\SitecorePowerShell\ for this purpose I set up junction points in my Sitecore instance folder to point at my repository folder. To do this I delete the folders that were created by the install package and perform the Junction creation. Assuming the folders as they were specified before you can write a short batch file that would look like this: Read the rest of this article »