Solution

Roll out multilingual item branches en masse using Sitecore PowerShell Extensions

I’ve received this nice comment on one of my earlier posts and I thought it might warrant a blog post since it is a nice little challenge and might be useful for more scripters in our community.

Hi Adam, thanks for the pointers on PowerShell! There’s one in particular I’m hoping to get some help with, if that’s ok? I have created a Branch Template in Sitecore, and I want to deploy it under every item in the Content Tree that uses one particular page template (about 200 instances of deployment, in this case). For an added bit of fun, there will be several different language versions being deployed along the way, so I guess that prevents me doing a blanket rollout. Could you please recommend a script that is along the lines of “Add this Branch Template under this Item ID in the following named language codes”? I realise I would then be repeating that line 200 times with varying parent item ID and languages, but I can live with that if that’s the easiest way to do it. Many thanks for your help! Phil Neale

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Do not turn Sitecore Media Request protection off and protect older Sitecore versions with ImageGuard

The post is related to the image resize vulnerability fix introduced in Sitecore 7.5. To read more about the Sitecore fix go to the Release notes page and search for ?Media request protection?. While I was holding off for a number of months on the publication of the post as it puts the attack vector in plainer sight that I would like it to be (while the community figured out how to work with Media Resizing in a neat way) - but recently I’ve seen voices raised considering turning the Media Request protection off which I hope you will not be doing after reading this post. The post will also tell you how to enable such security on your older versions of Sitecore. So here’s the story…. At some point in Cognifide we have performed a research around Sitecore security and one of my colleagues (Marek)  found out that you could easily kill any Sitecore instance by performing an image resize attack on it. While the CMS did some rudimentary checks and limited the values of height and width you could still perform an attack by harvesting the images from the site and perform multiple parallel & iterative size increase or just plain use the scale parameter to achieve any image size. A result of such attack would be a a denial of service due to 100% CPU & memory usage and would potentially allow for filling the server drive by creating the endless number of scaling calls. Marek was even kind enough to provide a proof of concept code that confirmed the hypothesis by performing attack on a few of our internal servers. The program would load the home page; parse to find images linked from it and perform resizing of the images in a number threads.

Turn your Sitecore PowerShell reports into applications with Action Scripts

In one of my previous posts I described how to create reports in Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE for short) that allow you to leverage the joint power of Sitecore and PowerShell to deliver complete and elegant reports in little to no time. In this post I’ll tell you how to take this a step further and operationalize them into full blown Sitecore Desktop applications. The secret sauce is in the actions you can place on the report, the additional parameters that I haven’t mentioned in the previous post, and the use of Sitecore rules engine with some rules that come with SPE. For the purpose of this post I will limit the scripts to samples that are (mostly) in the vanilla SPE deployment. Let’s begin with describing the actions and how you can configure them to appear in your reports.

Rapid API prototyping for Sitecore with PowerShell Extensions

This post describes how you can deliver JSON/XML/HTML APIs quickly with Sitecore PowerShell Extensions. Technically this was also available earlier but the API was not refined to the state it is now. As Sitecore is constantly progressing from predominantly serving as a  CMS towards becoming a mobile and web application delivery platform (which is very apparent by the recent increase of SPEAK popularity, the introduction of Item Web API and the app centric nature of the new Sitecore 8 interface there is an increased need to rapidly deliver APIs for those those front end applications to work seamlessly with the CMS back-end. PowerShell Extensions can help you with that move by enabling rapid prototyping of APIs that are either JSON or XML in nature.

Using Sitecore Content Search in PowerShell Extensions

This is just a short post to supplement the “Working with Sitecore items in PowerShell Extensions” as we now have a new cmdlet of retrieving items in SPE 3.0. Find-Item cmdlet allows you to leverage the glorious new search API Sitecore introduced in the 7.0 version of its CMS to retrieve items using the Sitecore Content Search indexes. You will find the available parameters on it as follows:

Set up Sitecore PowerShell Extensions development environment

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*

Upgrading your Sitecore PowerShell Extensions from 2.x to 3.x - what you need to know

I’m really excited to see the 3.0 version of Sitecore PowerShell Extensions released. There have been more effort, love and sweat poured into this version by the whole team than I would ever expect. This blog has been written to assert the smoothest upgrade experience possible. While we’re always striving for the smoothest upgrade possible - this version introduces some changes that require you to perform a manual step or two. While those could be automated to a degree, making those manual was a conscious choice as I didn’t want to break e.g. your Insite instance that stores some of its files in the “Console” sub-folder of the Website folder. Before upgrading your instance from Sitecore PowerShell Extensions 2.x to 3.0 please make sure you have your scripts backed up as the upgrade process might cause some of your scripts to be removed. This is especially true if you used the integration script libraries and you are upgrading from SPE 2.7 or earlier. If you’re upgrading from version 2.8 and your script live in your own modules You should be safe although it’s always smart to back up. The steps you need to take prior or after installing the new version of the PowerShell Extensions:

Introducing PowerShell Actions for Sitecore Workflows

This has been on my plate for a while and to be honest I’m not sure what took me so long as it literally took around 4 hours from start to completion which I consider a testament to how easy it is to create additional integrations with PowerShell akin to the Gutter integration or the login/logout integration Michael West has recently introduced in the platform.

What this integration allows you to do is to eliminate the need for code deployment when you’re in need for a quick action here and there for when a user executes a workflow command. You might find this article helpful by a Cognifide colleague of mine. I especially like this image which illustrates nicely where actions fit in a Sitecore workflow.

Sitecore PowerShell Extensions Persistent Sessions

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve probably read about the ways of putting scripts in the Content Editor ribbon or Context Menu. Those are some simple and quick ways of extending the Sitecore UI to do quick actions accessible for your users without them having to even know about the existence of PowerShell in your system. Up until now however we’ve not been very vocal about the fact that those does not really have to be quick one-off actions but they can indeed form a broader solution to your problem through the use of persistent, named sessions. In fact Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) allow you to manage sessions and decide that it should stay in memory after the script have executed. In fact SPE does quite a bit of session maintenance itself that you might want to be aware of.

Creating beautiful Sitecore reports easily with PowerShell Extensions

Creating reports is probably a task that every developer dread. I for once always felt like listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ?16 Tons? every time when I was supposed to do it for yet another project audit – especially this part resonated with me:

I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal And the straw boss said “Well, a-bless my soul”

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Working with Sitecore items in PowerShell Extensions

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.

Zip and Download Sitecore Media Library Folder with PowerShell

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:

Re-create a site structure from its sitemap in your Sitecore instance with PowerShell

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:

React to Sitecore events with PowerShell scripts

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.

How Sitecore PowerShell got GUI support… a tale of JobMonitor and Sitecore async UI API.

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.

PowerShell Scripted data sources in Sitecore (Part 2)

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!

PowerShell Scripted datasources in Sitecore (Part 1)

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!

Be your own Sitecore Professional Services with PowerShell (Part 2)

So I’ve finally found a moment (well a few days actually) to follow up on the previous article, and just about time as there are quite a few more tricks that PowerShell can help you with when assessing the quality of your Sitecore solution. One thing that you need to keep in mind when reading the recommendations is that they are exactly that – recommendations. While Sitecore strongly encourages you that you follow them – I can see how most of those are perfectly fine to be ditched in some situations, you just need to be careful about picking those situations. By the general rule of thumb though, following vendor recommendations is a good thing and they are usually a good metrics of a well put together solution. Most of statistics provided in this post are hard to gather without a scripting solution like Sitecore PowerShell Console or Revolver.

Be your own Sitecore Professional Services with PowerShell (Part 1)

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.

Your own PowerShell commandlets

There is a lot of new stuff in the imminent 2.0 release of the PowerShell Console for Sitecore. Some of it is fairly obvious like the improved console window, some of it not so much. The aim of the console has always be to enable Sitecore developers to extend the CMS in new exciting ways. For this to happen it had to become a mini-platform on its own. So far you could use it to add scripts to ribbons and menus, write scripted tasks and execute scripts just by launching them from a URL call. That’s extending Sitecore with PowerShell but what about PowerShell itself? One of the coolest features introduced in 2.0 is the ability to write your own commandlets. Sure you could always use PowerShell to do it and write commandlets in script. But then the caveat was that you had to attach such commandlets to your own scripts (or put them in the initial script that would have to execute prior to the console). Now I’m talking about writing the real commandlets, just like those that come with the PowerShell console itself. Starting from 2.0 the console does not default to only attach commandlets that come with it, but can also scan other assemblies to attach your commandlets. To add your own all you have to do is well.. write them but then? all you have to do is to use the standard Sitecore include mechanism to enable the console to find them.

State of PowerShell for Sitecore for April 2012

While I’m updating it on a separate page I thought for the purpose of having a record and further tracking - it would be interesting to capture the state of the PowerShell knowledge in the Sitecore community here as well.

How do I get the PowerShell Console for Sitecore?

• Download the Console installation package from its Sitecore Shared Source page.
• Introductory documentation to PowerShell console on its Shared Source page.

Adam’s (101 level) blogs for PowerShell Console for Sitecore

• So what PowerShell Console for Sitecore is and what can it do for me?
• Sitecore PowerShell Console cheat sheet Part 1 & Part 2
• Sample scripts for Sitecore PowerShell Console

How PowerShell console can help you extend Sitecore?

• Continuous deployment in Sitecore with PowerShell
• Extending Sitecore ribbon with PowerShell scripts
• PowerShell driven Sitecore scheduled tasks

External Content helpful for Sitecore PowerShell Scripters

• Free PowerShell EBooks
• Sitecore Virtual User Group:  An Introduction into PowerShell from a Sitecore .NET Developer

Alternative solutions

• PowerShell console in Sitecore Rocks – part of the Sitecore Rocks extension to Visual Studio
• psTerminal – not available yet (currently in development by Andrew Chumachenko of Sitecore UA) – introduced on Sitecore Virtual User Group Webinar.

The PowerShell co-nerds within Sitecore Community

Other people that did research in the field, adopted the console early and/or are knowledgeable in the subject:

Sitecore PowerShell Console cheat sheet – Part 2

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: Sitecore PowerShell Console cheat sheet – Part 1. In all cases where it made sense I’ve converted the samples to establish them in Sitecore scenarios.

How to Write Conditional Statements

To write an If statement use code similar to this:

Sitecore PowerShell Console cheat sheet – Part 1

I’m realizing time and time again that the learning curve for PowerShell can be steep without a proper guidance. While most people I talk to are very excited about the concept they become discouraged after a having some tries and not realizing its full potential. Therefore I decided it’s worth spending some time introducing some basic principles to help scripting alleviate some of the initial pains.

I have gathered some literature available for free about the topic of PowerShell in general you might want to read, but I also think that a distillation of the basic concepts is really important so you can have some quick wins while you begin your PowerShell journey.

PowerShell driven Sitecore scheduled tasks

So now that you can easily create the menus and ribbons executing PowerShell scripts, it might be a good time to do some more administrative tasks? let’s start with scheduled tasks. I’m not going to go deep into the task scheduling, you can find an excellent post by John West on his blog regarding task scheduling. Currently the PowerShell module supports one of the ways described in the post – the section describing how to configure them is called ?Scheduled Tasks? in the blog.

Extending Sitecore ribbon with PowerShell scripts

Sitecore is built from the grounds up with extendibility in mind. Be that plugging into any place in its internal pipelines or any aspect of its User eXperience, therefore when I’ve managed to extend it’s context menu, I expected to have no problems whatsoever doing the same to its ribbon. Mind you I was right?

Using the PowerShell Console Module it took me less than 10 minutes total to add a nice piece of functionality that I thought was missing – Publish items I have modified.

Context PowerShell scripts for Sitecore

In the he latest update of PowerShell Console for Sitecore, I’ve started experimenting with further integration – context scripts. What is that and what can it do for you?

You can safely assume PowerShell is not something your regular users will aspire to learn, but it does not mean they cannot harness its power if you enable them to.

If you look closely at the latest Microsoft solutions you may notice that a lot of what GUI does is running some scripting behind the scenes. This is true for a long time with the SQL Server Management studio where pretty much for any action you can generate a script that will let you automate a common task.

Sample scripts for Sitecore PowerShell Console

Find out about your configuration:

List your available site providers. You will use the name provided in the “Name” column in place of where I use “cms” in the later samples.

1get-psdrive `
2  | where-object { $_.Provider.ToString() -eq "CmsItemProvider"} `
3  | format-table Name, Root

Sample scripts for working with pages:

For the same of brevity I’m assuming your location is already somewhere within a Sitecore tree (e.g. you did something akin to cd master:\content prior to executing the following scripts.

PowerShell Console for Sitecore – what can it do for me?

The aim of the PowerShell console for Sitecore is to create a command line interface to your data so you can automate and aggregate mundane tasks as well as create statistics and a discoverability layer on top of your content. Have you ever found yourself:

• having to make a mundane change to a large number of pages?
• in need of getting statistics field or template usages?
• being curious of e.g. what’s the oldest page on your site?
• in need to find out how many authors really create your content and how active they are?
• having to copy or move a large number of files from one folder to another?
• renaming or deleting files in your file store en-masse?
• publish pages that match some specific feature rather than a whole branch?

If the answer to any of those (and more) is something akin to “yes I did!”, I believe you might find my little plugin useful. The idea is to create a scripting environment to work within Sitecore process, being able to make native calls to Sitecore API and modify content on a per-property level. The goal was to make it familiar to your IT and developers so they can reuse their skillset with it or if they rather learn it here, this knowledge will benefit them in the long run as clearly PowerShell is becoming an industry standard. The plugin’s aim is to 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 console allows you to execute and test scripts interactively, but also gives the admin means of exposing scripts to end users within context menus and in the ribbon. I’m sure in the long run I’ll come up with more applications. Scripted pipeline processors? Scripted renderings? Scripting campaigns statistics and engagement workflow steps? You name it… Now there is Rocks interface that performs similar task which I think is brilliant, however slightly - yet significantly different. Rocks integrates with your Windows PowerShell console and allows you to work on your remote website as if it was a file system on your machine. Rocks also features a number of commandlets that help you with some common tasks. The definite bonus of this approach is that you can simply use it in your deployment script and integrate some common content modifications, or clear caches/recycle bins on your server in a timely manner from your monitoring environment. I think the solution is a really needed addition to your Sitecore toolbox, but… it’s somewhat limited. Namely whatever new idea you want to employ in your script, is either supported by the commandlets provided – or impossible. You have access to all the goodies of rocks, but any extension must first be imagined and implemented in Rocks (both server and client side). The Sitecore Console however works within the process of your Sitecore site and therefore can instantiate and execute any API Sitecore features. The only limit is that of the imagination. this comes at a price too though. The most important thing is security. The PowerShell plugin by itself does not run with elevated privileges, nor does it circumvent the rights, but since you can use any Sitecore API a malicious person could potentially do it themselves – therefore you need to be careful whom do you grant access to the PowerShell Console. The console comes with some sample scripts when you install it – review the script and press Ctrl+Enter to execute and see some of the interesting use cases for it. By default the console creates a “drive” for each of your databases so you will definitely have a “core” and “master” drives, and you will most probably have a “web” drive. Since this is only an introductory post I’ll let you discover the full list of commands by yourself, just use the following script within the console:

Enable Sitecore DMS Analytics behind a proxy or a CDN

Should you put your Sitecore site behind a load balancing proxy you will run into a bit of a problem with analytics where all the Engagement Analytics app would ever report would be your own load balancing proxy’s IP address. Needless to say that is fairly big loss as you are unable to reap a host of benefits of the Sitecore CEP like page personalization, automation and reporting. While our website was running on Sitecore 6.4 this problem was already solved and we have implemented something akin to the solution from Jeroen’s blog. Meanwhile Sitecore has reimplemented its analytics engine from the grounds up in version 6.5, and I should say they did a great job on that. However in the process the API for the analytics has changed to a degree that made our current solution obsolete, basically what we got logged looked as follows:

PowerShell for EPiServer - cheat sheet - Part 2

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:

PowerShell for EPiServer - cheat sheet - Part 1

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.

EPiServer Admin Mode PowerShell scripts

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?

 1<ContextScriptCollection>
 2  <Title>Statistics Scripts</Title>
 3  <Description>This script collection ... </Description>
 4  <Area>Administration</Area>
 5  <Scripts>
 6    <ContextScript>
 7      <Title>Restart Application</Title>
 8      <Description>The script restarts this instance of EPiServer...</Warning>
 9      <Script>Restart-Application</Script>
10      <Icon>/App_Themes/Default/Images/Tools/Refresh.gif</Icon>
11      <Groups>
12      </Groups>
13    </ContextScript>
14  </Scripts>
15</ContextScriptCollection>

Where can I access that?

Context PowerShell Scripts in EPiServer

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

PowerShell console – now compatible with EPiServer CMS 6 R2

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)

The Console of Mass Content Management

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.

Easy Enum property for EPiServer

One of the most frequently and eagerly used programming constructs of the Microsoft.Net Framework is Enum. There are several interesting features that make it very compelling to use to for all kinds of dropdowns and checklists:

• The bounds factor – proper use of Enum type guarantee that the selected value will fall within the constraints of the allowed value set.
• The ability to treat Enums as flags (and compound them into flag sets) as well as a one-of selector.
• The ease of use and potentially complete separation of the ?Enum value? from the underlying machine type representation that ensures the most efficient memory usage.

Surprisingly enough EPiServer as it stands right now does not have an easy facility to turn Enums into properties. To give credit where credit is due, the EPiServer framework provides a nice surrogate that mimic that behaviour to a degree. The relevant property types are:

Database-based paged EPiServer searches for CMS 5 R2 SP2

Aparently I have written something on that note before for CMS 4 and it looks like someone still needs it as I got a request for an updated version for it a couple of days ago. So here we go:

for the most part the syntax for the call is equivalent to what is was before so go to my previous article regarding that (check out the old article for details). What I’ve added this time around is:

SoakIE – a Web Server Stress Tool with a twist

Last week or so ago a couple of friends in another project in Cognifide has run into a wall while trying to load test their website. the problem was as follows: The website is highly AJAX based – the page merely loads a stub in the initial request but then loads the rest of its data in a dynamic matter therefore a traditional web testing tools are fairly useless. What they tried was to setup a number of Selenium clients to pound the server, but that turned out to be fairly challenging to the machine doing the testing. It was not possible to set up more than 10 clients on a fairly strong machine.

Advanced Language Manipulation Tool for EPiServer

Have you ever (or have your customers) created and edited a page in one language only to realize that their selected locale was wrong? Have you ever wished you could delete a master language branch of a page  after creating its localized counterpart but you could only delete the newly created slave language instead? Have a customer ever requested that they could copy a whole branch and you convert it to another language so that they could then translate in-place?

Get out of my way! ... or the story of file metadata for VirtualPathProvider in EPiServer

Immediately after you implement the VirtualPathProvider proxy from my previous post you will notice a one fairly serious lack in it. Namely all the files within that provider will be hiding behind the registration form. That is not cool for a couple of reasons?

• You may want to keep all of the files in one store – being forced to put them into a designated folder is not desired.
• You may want to make some file freely available for some time and lock it after a while, or the other way around (e.g. to allow the robots to crawl it initially). having to move them is just silly and defeats the purpose.

So how do you discriminate the files that you want locked from those that you want to be publically available, and potentially from those that you want only the logged in users to be able to get?

Simple registration for files served by EPiServer

With the culture of knowledge sharing and open source spreading, everyone races to show they have something valuable that you may want. And while you may not ask for money for your content you may still want to get something in return, say a contact, an email address that’s verified (or not), to keep in touch with the consumer of your content.

Yet a full fledged registration doesn’t seem like a proper thing to do – cluttering your EPiServer user repository with (let’s face it – for a large part fake or temporary email addresses that user create only to get your content).

Merged contacts in gmail rendered uneditable - the fix

Long story short. Bought G1 lately so I’ve decided to bring peace to my tormented contact list once and for all. Editing in Gmail is… adequate. I’ve been able to import most of my contacts - naturally countless of those were duplicates as I integrated my mail contact list and my phone contact list. Where gmail contacts list editing excels is at allowing you to merge those.

It’s incredibly convenient: