PCheX this out...

If you're already maintaining a decent Sitecore Blogroll you know this. But in case this blog has escaped your attention, I think you need to take a look at this: Check your packages with PCheX As someone who often designs update packages and mail them off to clients, I am sure this tool will quickly make it to the top of my list of favourite tools and save me a lot of hassle. The description says it all lol... ;-) "In a way, you can imagine PCheX to be like a little friendly elf who comes around and kindly whacks you around the head with a big rubber hammer if you design an unhealthy package. " And we certainly don't want to get whacked by big rubber hammers do we? :P

Two for the bookmarks

Some of this information has been available for a while, it just hasn't been easy to locate. It actually still isn't ;-) But at least these two links look like they might be more or less permanent. 1) Sitecore 6 Release Notes Gives you all information about known current issues. A big help, which should help you avoid getting too stuck trying to solve a particular issue - only to find that it is already known, and in some cases even comes with a workaround. 2) Sitecore 6 Change Log Detailed information about the individual updates, so you can now be confident when choosing whether to go with the Recommended Release or the Latest Release.

DomainObjects Update 2 released

Just posted an update of DomainObjects onto the Sitecore Shared Source space.

Apart from a few tuneups, this update is primarily about built-in support for referrers.

Say you have a product hierarchy like this:

We are then often tasked with listing or in other ways extracting products based on a selected category (or media, as could be the case in this example). In the simplest of forms, the output could look like this (although I hope no live site would ever look like this :P):

With DomainObjects this is now a very straight forward piece of code. All based on an article by Lars Floe Nielsen which I often refer back to.

Sitecore 6 package, sources, API documentation have all been posted to the Trac space.

Wow @ Sitecore 6 Item Creation Speed

I remember this was being brought up right around the time of release of Sitecore 6, that item creation speed had been increased since Sitecore 5. To be honest, I haven't really noticed. Until today that is. For a client, I am currently in the process of converting/migrating an entire website based on the Polopoly CMS system to Sitecore 6. Essentially a process of getting all the source content, parsing and understanding it, mapping it to relevant Sitecore templates (around 20) in all and writing this entire new structure into Sitecore. Take a look at the numbers I am getting. Migration process starting.... Deleting existing content....done! Building Table of Contents tree....done! Building Departments tree....done! Performing in-memory mapping...done! Duration: -00:03:58.2400000 7271 items created in total - 471 products - 59 images - 1678 documents - 3728 other articles - 1335 departments 7.271 items created (using BulkUpdateContext()) in just under 4 minutes. One word. Fast! :-)