Reading some of the blogs from the Sitecore community I find it pretty apparent that we didn?t do a great job advocating the optimizations that PowerShell Extensions have introduced for working with Sitecore items. This blog attempts to rectify this problem to a degree.

How do I retrieve my Sitecore items the PowerShell way?

The most natural way to retrieve Sitecore items is with use of Get-Item and Get-ChildItem commandlets. That is because those 2 commandlets add a PowerShell wrapping around them that allows the functionalities that I?m going to describe in the next section of this blog after I?ll tell you all about retrieving items.

If you have retrieved your item directly using the Sitecore API you can still add the nice wrapper when you pipe them through the Wrap-Item commandlet as well. Some of those enhancements work in the older versions of PowerShell Extensions but I would encourage you to upgrade to the latest version (2.7 at the time this blog was written) to leverage the full potential of the environment.

Read the rest of this article »

I?ve decided to 1-up the game from my previous post and zip something that isn?t really a real file but rather a blob in a Sitecore database. The script below is based heavily on the last post but instead of just zipping content of a flat folder traverses the Sitecore item tree and zips all files beneath the current folder.

If you have downloaded the 2.1 version of the Sitecore PowerShell Console from the Sitecore Marketplace you will actually have the script deployed on your system already.

Here?s how it looks like for your user in the Content Editor:

The script that performs the operation looks as follows: Read the rest of this article »

Last night I needed to reproduce really quickly a site structure we will be moving from another CMS and create a matching item hierarchy in my Sitecore instance… I could face an hour or so of boring clicking and copying and pasting and hoping I’ve not missed anything or… I could write a short PowerShell script to do the work for me… Guess which path I chose?

Before you use the script you should customize the script parameters:

• $sitemapUrl – url of the sitemap of the site you want to clone
• $prefix – wither site root or a branch you want to copy
• $postfix – if a site has postfixes like .php or .aspx you want to get rid of – define it here
• $itemTemplate – the template that should be used for items the script will create

Or just run the script and enjoy the glorious cognifide.com page structure reproduced in your Sitecore… now how cool is THAT!?

Also… now that I’ve got your attention… Cognifide’s PowerShell Console 2.0 FINAL is now available on Sitecore Marketplace. Get your copy and… Happy Scripting!

# Script configuration
# --------------------

$sitemapUrl = "http://www.cognifide.com/sitemap";

$prefix = "http://www.cognifide.com/";
$postfix = ".aspx$"

$createAt = "master:/content/Home/"
$itemTemplate = "/templates/Sample/Sample Item"

#                    
# Script starts here 
# ------------------                   

# function to create items (creates parent recursively if needed)
function CreateItem ([string]$itemName) {
  $fullPath = "$createAt\$itemName"
  $parentPath = Split-Path $itemName -parent
  if(-not (Test-Path "$createAt\$parentPath")){
    if($parentPath.Length -gt 2){
      CreateItem $parentPath
    }
  }
  if(-not (Test-Path "$fullPath")){
    "Creating $fullPath"
    $item = New-Item -ItemType $itemTemplate -Name $itemName -Path $createAt
    $item."__Display name" = $itemName -split '[\\/]' | `
      Select -last 1 | `
      ForEach-Object { $_ -replace "-", " " }
  }
}

# Get the sitemap
[xml]$w = (new-object net.webclient).DownloadString($sitemapUrl);

# Get the urls frm the xml
$locations = $w.urlset.url | `
             Where-Object {$_.loc -match $prefix} | `
             Select-Object `
               loc, `
               @{Name="Path"; `
                 Expression = {$_.loc -replace $prefix,"" -replace $postfix,""}}

# send url's for creation
$locations | % { 
  $name = $_.Path.Trim('/')
  if(-not (Test-Path "$createAt/$name")){
    CreateItem $name
  }
}

Enjoy!

Kieranties must be the biggest PowerShell nerd (together with yours truly) I?ve had a privilege to chat with (I guess this implies I talk to myself?). So it shouldn?t be a surprise when the two started talking PowerShell/Sitecore pixie dust started sparkling.

This time ? events integration.

What does it take to integrate PowerShell with Sitecore events?

This is a fairly easy task that Sitecore pretty thoroughly describes in the ?Using Events? SDN article. So there is little point for me to reiterate it here.

The integration requires to add some entries to the include files. I?ve added definitions for most of the item related events to the Cognifide.PowerShell.config file, but commented them out, because I don?t want you to have any performance penalty associated with the PowerShell Console installation and by default it has some scripts defined for you to try out.. All you need to do to enable it is to uncomment the <events> section of the config file and scripts will start firing up.

Implementation is pretty straightforward – the console has well defined place within its script libraries where your scripts should be placed:

Read the rest of this article »

One thing I always wanted to add to the Cognifide PowerShell Console for Sitecore but never had the chance to investigate properly, was GUI and user interaction. For example in a regular PowerShell console when an irreversible action needs to be taken or one that user needs to be notified about – a question is asked:

Unfortunately due to the stateless and non-persistent nature of HTTP connections this is not easily achievable in Sitecore Sheer environment especially since in our case a PowerShell session usually lives in a separate thread within a Sitecore Job.

I knew this had to be achievable as Sitecore allows for rich interaction with user e.g. during a package installation process but I could not find any documentation regarding this subject, and my Sitecore gurus’ posts were pretty discouraging in that regard:

• All About Jobs in the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS by John West
• Using Sitecore Jobs by Brian Pedersen

But heck(!) Somehow the package Installer manages to show those pesky Overwrite/Merge/Skip dialogs, right?

Not discouraged by the early discoveries, I’ve dusted my trusty copy of Reflector and dived inside the installer code. Following are the findings of my investigations and sample solutions for using them with your Jobs.

Read the rest of this article »

One thing I always wanted to add to the Cognifide PowerShell Console for Sitecore but never had the chance to investigate properly, was GUI and user interaction. For example in a regular PowerShell console when an irreversible action needs to be taken or one that user needs to be notified about ? a question is asked:

Unfortunately due to the stateless and non-persistent nature of HTTP connections this is not easily achievable in Sitecore Sheer environment especially since in our case a PowerShell session usually lives in a separate thread within a Sitecore Job.

I knew this had to be achievable as Sitecore allows for rich interaction with user e.g. during a package installation process but I could not find any documentation regarding this subject, and my Sitecore gurus? posts were pretty discouraging in that regard:

• All About Jobs in the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS by John West
• Using Sitecore Jobs by Brian Pedersen

But heck(!) Somehow the package Installer manages to show those pesky Overwrite/Merge/Skip dialogs, right?

Not discouraged by the early discoveries, I?ve dusted my trusty copy of Reflector and dived inside the installer code. Following are the findings of my investigations and sample solutions for using them with your Jobs.

Read the rest of this article »

One thing I always wanted to add to the Cognifide PowerShell Console for Sitecore but never had the chance to investigate properly, was GUI and user interaction. For example in a regular PowerShell console when an irreversible action needs to be taken or one that user needs to be notified about ? a question is asked:

Unfortunately due to the stateless and non-persistent nature of HTTP connections this is not easily achievable in Sitecore Sheer environment especially since in our case a PowerShell session usually lives in a separate thread within a Sitecore Job.

I knew this had to be achievable as Sitecore allows for rich interaction with user e.g. during a package installation process but I could not find any documentation regarding this subject, and my Sitecore gurus? posts were pretty discouraging in that regard:

• All About Jobs in the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS by John West
• Using Sitecore Jobs by Brian Pedersen

But heck(!) Somehow the package Installer manages to show those pesky Overwrite/Merge/Skip dialogs, right?

Not discouraged by the early discoveries, I?ve dusted my trusty copy of Reflector and dived inside the installer code. Following are the findings of my investigations and sample solutions for using them with your Jobs.

Read the rest of this article »

There are 2 more ways I?ve managed to find and implement that you can control data sources with PowerShell:

• rendering data source roots
• rendering data source itself

The motivation would be similar to what I?ve described in the ?Part 1? blog post. So without further ado let?s cut to the meat?

Rendering Data Source Roots

You might want your roots to be dynamic and you can deliver those using a PowerShell script!

Sitecore allows you to specify a place in the content tree where content for your rendering or sublayout can be selected from. More over it allows you to specify more than one of those roots. What?s even greater ? this is done through a pipeline defined in web.config, which means we can hook into it with? PowerShell!

A cool part of the experience is that you can have multiple roots, which means that your scripts can be more liberal in what roots they expose.

Read the rest of this article »

Reading some time ago the Item Buckets documentation I discovered something really cool called code data sources. We delivered something similar in our internal libraries and it proved super useful ever since. I?ve also recently read a nice article by Ronald Nieuwenhuis on NewGuid about their approach to the subject.

So what a PowerShell and Sitecore nut does when he sees stuff like that? Obviously delivers a scripted data source!

Why do that?

Just to prove that both Sitecore and PowerShell are infinitely malleable and mixable, is good enough for me, but that?s not really the reason someone other than me would be interested in it.

• Delivering complex functionality based on multiple criteria. e.g. your field may need to provide different set of items to choose from based on:
  • user name or role (in simplest case this can be done using right management, but maybe not always possible in a more elaborate scenario)
  • current day or month?
  • In a multisite/multimarket scenario you may want to show different items for each site
  • based on engagement analytics parameters of the page
  • based on where in the tree an item exist (some of it can be done with use of a ?query:?)
  • anything you might want to build the code data source for?

Something that would be beyond the reach of a regular Sitecore query and potentially something that you would really need to deliver code source for. But maybe you?re not in a position to deploy that on your environment?

Read the rest of this article »

Recently I?ve been asked to audit a site for one of our clients. Overall for a fairly seasoned Sitecore developer it?s rather obvious what to look for in a site and get a feel for whether an a solution is thoroughly thought through or just put together using brute-force development. You can usually tell if the implementation is sloppy or excellent, but how do you quantify that feeling to give the objective view to the person reading your report? Looking at the Sitecore Developer Network I?ve found the following set of recommendations. This is a great help with codifying how a proper Sitecore implementation should look like, what should we pay attention to and most importantly it?s a great reference when you?re trying to prove that your feeling is something more than just nitpicking but rather an industry standard that the developers should adhere to. I recommend strongly that you look at it and think how closely your practices match those that Sitecore recommends.

There is a small problem though. Not all of them are easy to asses, at least not without some clever tools in your toolbox. for example what do I do with a statement like:

Use TreelistEx instead of Treelist when showing very big trees ? like the Home node and its descendants ? or have lots of Treelist fields in one single item. TreelistEx only computes the tree when you click Edit whereas a Treelist will compute it every time it is rendered.

It might be fine in a small site to verify in a few data templates that it?s not violated, but  In my case I was dealing with a multisite platform that can potentially host tens or even hundreds of sites? Going manually over the hundreds of fields in nearly 300 data templates, bah even finding them ? would not be fun or easy thing to do. But hey? we have PowerShell why should I look there if I can whip up a one liner for it? Let?s try it then.

Read the rest of this article »