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)

A story of a saved EPiServer site

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.

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.

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.

CMS UX – give the content some thought!

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.

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:

Eric Evans on Domain Driven Design

Eric Evans of Domain Driven Design will be giving a talk at PUT just before Eclipse DemoCamp, June 24th @ 18:00.  Cognifide are sponsoring the event and it would be a great chance for you guys to dust of those design skills.  Domain Driven Design is going to be course that we hope to run out of the Cognifide Office late this year with the a little help from our friends at Skills Matter.