Most of this post is also based on the Microsoft?s Windows PowerShell Quick Reference however despite the sharing scripting runtimes the nature of the both shells differ considerably as described in the previous post: PowerShell for EPiServer – cheat sheet – Part 1. In all cases where it made sense I?ve converted the samples to establish them in EPiServer scenarios.

How to Write Conditional Statements

To write an If statement use code similar to this:

$page = Get-CurrentPage;
$changedBy = $page.ChangedBy;
$me = [EPiServer.Security.PrincipalInfo]::Current;
$myName = $me.Name;

if ($changedBy -eq "")
  { "Unspecified author - a system page?" }
elseif ($changedBy -eq $myName)
  { "The page has been last edited by me!" }
else
  { "The page has been last edited by "+ $changedBy }

Instead of writing a series of If statements you can use a Switch statement, which is equivalent to VBScript?s Select Case statement:

$page = Get-CurrentPage;
switch ($page.PageChildOrderRule) {
    0 {"Undefined sort order. "}
    1 {"Most recently created page will be first in list"}
    2 {"Oldest created page will be first in list"}
    3 {"Sorted alphabetical on name"}
    4 {"Sorted on page index"}
    5 {"Most recently changed page will be first in list"}
    6 {"Sort on ranking, only supported by special controls"}
    7 {"Oldest published page will be first in list"}
    8 {"Most recently published page will be first in list"}
    default {"No idea what that means!"}
  }

How to Write For and For Each Loops

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Most of this is based on the Microsoft?s Windows PowerShell Quick Reference however despite the sharing scripting runtimes the nature of the both shells are pretty different (although the differences are not as vast as one might think).

That said, I considered that enough of the Reference document is irrelevant in the EPiServer scenario that it?s beneficial for the users of the console to have a bespoke cheat sheet created especially for the purpose of this plugin.

The content & samples of the original cheat sheet has been adjusted to more closely reflect scenarios usable for an EPiServer admin or developer.

So here go the EPiServer specific tips

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The PowerShell plugin gets an update once again to support Admin mode script collections in addition to the context scripts.

How to write an Admin mode script collections?

<ContextScriptCollection>
  <Title>Statistics Scripts</Title>
  <Description>This script collection ... </Description>
  <Area>Administration</Area>
  <Scripts>
    <ContextScript>
      <Title>Restart Application</Title>
      <Description>The script restarts this instance of EPiServer...</Warning>
      <Script>Restart-Application</Script>
      <Icon>/App_Themes/Default/Images/Tools/Refresh.gif</Icon>
      <Groups>
      </Groups>
    </ContextScript>
  </Scripts>
</ContextScriptCollection>

Where can I access that?

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Ok, so I?ve got my shot of endorphins writing about PowerShell last week (damn, it?s nice to be able to code again!), and I got pretty determined on making it usable and achieving all the goals I?ve initially envisioned. and in the process build a usable tool and a library of scripts that people can use either directly or to modify to meet their needs.

The goal for this week: Context Scripts

Context scripts are the first step to break the scripting out of the admin realm and into the editor?s space. Those scripts will still be written by admins and developers but the goal is for them to be usable by the authors. The goal for those scripts can be as trivial as e.g. syndicating all the great functionality little plugins like this Unpublish button by Ted in one place and then mix and match them to your liking.

Some of the important bits:

• Context scripts are something that is visible to users on ?Scripts? page.
• Scripts can be exposed to everyone or just the groups of your liking? you define it in the script.
• Scripts are grouped in collections that are defined in *.psepi files that you drop into your application folder

How do I define a script collection?

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It’s 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 development… who knew?!

But I’ve 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 CMS’es we’re supporting. Which really sounded like a daunting task… 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 etc… well I couldn’t resist but to brag…

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.

I’m sorry Michael you had to go through this without PowerShell…

Deployment

The plugin will detect the version of EPiServer it’s 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 don’t touch any API that’s undergone a breaking change.

Again…

Read the rest of this article »

It?s 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 development? who knew?!

But I?ve 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 CMS?es we?re supporting. Which really sounded like a daunting task? 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 etc? well I couldn?t resist but to brag?

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.

I?m sorry Michael you had to go through this without PowerShell?

Deployment

The plugin will detect the version of EPiServer it?s 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 don?t touch any API that?s undergone a breaking change.

Again?

Read the rest of this article »

It?s 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 development? who knew?!

But I?ve 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 CMS?es we?re supporting. Which really sounded like a daunting task? 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 etc? well I couldn?t resist but to brag?

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.

I?m sorry Michael you had to go through this without PowerShell?

Deployment

The plugin will detect the version of EPiServer it?s 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 don?t touch any API that?s undergone a breaking change.

Again?

Read the rest of this article »

I meant to write this a long time ago but somehow that never really got out of the room. Following is a narrative of an EPiServer site that was on and off the net for half a year or longer and what I?ve learned in the process.

<day id=?1? />

We?ve gathered all the data from the client ? we know they have implemented custom ?skins? (basically controls that brand the mini sites based on under which domain the site is being displayed. Quite a cool solution. Also since they were struggling with the speed they have implemented a custom mini taxonomy based on Lucene.net to speed things up. Yet the site is terribly slow and keeps showing the familiar (for a developer) ?Application is busy under initialization? from time to time.

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This one definitely took more time than I initially expected, and before I devote even more to it I would very much like to hear your opinion. Do you find it useful? Which way should the development be going? But first things first?

Have you ever found yourself:

• having to make a mundane change to a large number of pages?
• in need of getting statistics on page properties or page type usages?
• being curious of e.g. what?s the oldest page on your site?
• having to copy or move a large number of files from one folder to another or between versioning and non versioning virtual path providers?
• renaming or deleting files in your file store en-masse?

If the answer to any of those (and more) is a ?yes!?, I believe you might find my little plugin useful.

The idea is to create a scripting environment to work with EPiServer on a more granular level than the existing PowerShell SnapIn API enables us currently. Manipulate not just sites, but files and pages on a large scale or perform statistical analysis of your content using  a familiar and well documented query language.

The PowerShell console for EPiServer provides you with two abstractions to work with:

Virtual Path Provider Drive

With the console you can browse the VPP and perform a number of file operations just like you were doing it in a regular PowerShell console on a regular disk drive. Especially?

• move files between Virtual path providers
• move, copy or rename files and folders

Known limitations:

• You cannot load files from disk directly onto a VPP and vice versa (this however can be overcome by mapping the path you want to migrate into your CMS as a native path provider and copying from that).
• some actions might not respect or might unintentionally force recursive operation.
• the console might blow up unexpectedly (What do you mean crippled? I got all five fingers! Three on this hand, two on the other one!)

I think you might find it quite useful offloading files from versioning VPP onto a Native VPP once you decide that you want to access the content of the files outside the CMS. Or pulling your files into the Database VPP (available for download from EPiCode).

Page Store Drives

The console will map all your CMS page roots as drives based on the site name (site name should not have space in it for the current version to work). Now this one? the sky is the limit!

The items that the drive exposes are fully functional PageData?s, additionally ? for your scripting convenience all page properties are mapped so that you can access them like they were regular POCO properties.

By far this is the coolest little toy I?ve recently played with ? I would strongly advised that you look into the samples and put your imagination to work!

You can create statistics, modify pages based on regular expressions, filter, delete, rename, move around?

Naturally the Obligatory disclaimer is that you use the tool at your own responsibility. Make backups, test your script on staging before doing anything. Heck! Don?t use it on production at all yet (!) ? it?s very much an alpha and a technology demo.

[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!

One of the many things we debate constantly at Cognifide is how to improve the user experience. How to make editor’s life easier, how to simplify the common everyday tasks, what can be automated, and simply how to make our customer smile a little when they use our projects.

For that to work, apart from the overall big blocks to be in place and working seamlessly (which is the absolute minimum required) – you need to be VERY attentive to details.

What happens when user enters a place in the system where they are not usually required to work, are they properly guided? What do they see if they click on a little link somewhere in the corner? Does every image has an Alt text attached to it? Do your buttons have tooltips? Do the users have alternate views on all content? Do the system communicates abnormal states in a descriptive way and guides the user towards the solution? Is the UI logically laid out? Did you REALLY think what property should go on which tab? Have you setup the property names in a way that they make sense to non programmer? Do they have descriptions?

Part of the job we do is help sometimes troubled EPiServer customers get their solution built elsewhere or in-house to work, and I seem to be noticing some patterns which we have addressed in Cognifide as being bad practices. Many of those stem from the lack of research of the content served being done in the discovery phase.

Discovery phase? What’s that?

It seems that a great deal of projects does not seem to be well thought out in many aspects. When you look at the solution, It feels like a developer just got some templates and ran with them. Once the front end matches what the html templates outline, the solution is pushed to production and forgotten by the design/development agency and the poor customer is struggling with it for years trying to improve the ever degrading performance and fighting the CMS UI that’s been thrown together in a rush. Possibly aggravating in the process and rebuilding it again and again.

You need to realize that once your site goes to production, the trouble begins for your customer, not ends.

Understand your content, please

A very basic tendency for a lot of them is storing all the content of one type under a single tree node. or a very basic hierarchy. But:

• What is the volume of content in the start?
• Have you talked to the client about the maintenance of the content?
• How do they plan to store older content?
  • Are they archiving it?
  • Do they plan to serve it to general while archived?
  • Is the old content actively browsed on the CMS side?
• What is the volume increase over time?
• What is the profile of the content? Is it a catalogue? Chronological news library?
• Is there a taxonomy in place?
• How often and which content is being modified?

EPiServer shows pages in a tree, and while we have observed the CMS performance improving over time there are some basic scenarios that the hierarchy structure will never be able to deal with efficiently if not well thought out.

So your potential edge case scenarios might be that the customer has:

1. 10 000 articles that need to be migrated for the site to go live, but they only plan to add 2-3 a month,
2. They might be starting fresh but they plan to add 20 to 30 articles a day!

How do you deal with those?

Obviously the worst thing you can do is to put them all under the “Articles” node. The customer will be frustrated to no end! Both you and the CMS reputation gets damaged while they try to do any basic thing in the CMS.

In the first case you need to work with the client to dissolve them into the hierarchy that’s granular enough to leave you with the 20-50 articles per node tops. Dividing it into 10 categories of roughly 1000 items won’t do! If the page names are meaningful, you may attempt to create a structure based on the first and second letter of the articles. This works best for directories of people or places.

The second case is probably going to happen to you when you will be working with any kind of news site, be that intranet of sorts or a news agency, TV portal or an information broker. In which case, it seems to be making the most sense to put the content into a chronological structure. Have a node for each year, month (and day if needed) there is an article.

AUTOMATE!

When a user writes an article that is supposed to fit into your content plan, move it into the proper node automatically. In the first case, move it to the proper category or based on the page title move it around to the proper place in the catalogue. In the chronological plan, move it to the day or month node upon creation. If a new node needs to be created for it – that’s your responsibility to do it. Organize the content for the user or you will be in a world of pain sooner than you expect!

Those tasks are easily automated by hooking into the page save and create events. Your customer will love you for it.

Naturally you don’t necessarily have to have a single plan on a given site. A site can have both branches with news-like plan and directory-like sub trees.

The base line is – you need to plan it ahead, and you need to learn about the content profile.

Distinction with a difference

You need to realize the distinction between the content and the presentation of it. Don’t try to cram the content into the browsing structure. Separation of concerns should not be limited to code organization. Separate concerns in the content structure as well.

Have the user trip designed around the best SEO practices. The hub pages should make sense from the visitor’s perspective. DON’T try to put your articles under it just because the hub page browses them. this may work for a little tiny sites but then again, those are not the sites that you will run into troubles because it basically means your customer is barely ever touching them.

Have your content stored in a separate branch and reach out for it with a tag set that is related to the hub page.

Build a logical taxonomy and stick to it!

That basically means – treat your content equally no matter where it’s stored – preferably having it tagged with a high performance framework like the Faceted Navigation Framework published by Cognifide some time ago or make it Lucene.Net based. You can try to use the EPiServer built in categories. We have had limited success with it and the performance of FindPagesWithCriteria (which we have effectively banned from our arsenal) but I was told the performance in that front have improved greatly in the latest EPiServer CMS release.

Regardless – don’t rely on the page hierarchy structure to select the content, it doesn’t matter where it is, the metadata is what should be driving the content stream. You can hand pick your navigation links, fine, but article lists, news, announcements, events, treat it as a single content stream. Use a taxonomy to divide it into categories and you will be much happier in the long run as you will gain much more flexibility to reorganize the structure and move the content around when its profile changes later.

Using the EPiServer CMS for nearly 4 years now, those are the basic principles we have come to establish.

I wonder what are your practices? Where do you think our practices do or do not fit your design philosophy? Is there anything we could do better? Do you have practices regarding content planning? How do you analyze the content to make the best plan for it?