Sitecore Data Reuse Talk

Here's my talk today on Sitecore data reuse options:

The slides can be viewed or downloaded here.

Sitecore Data Reuse Links

I will be presenting a talk on Data Reuse for the Sitecore Users Virtual Group tomorrow, Wednesday February 15 at Noon Eastern time. I'll be reviewing the options that Sitecore offers for data reuse: aliases, proxies, clones, wildcards, and pipeline handlers. I'll post a link to a video when it is available; in the meantime, I thought it would be useful to post the "Further Reading" links here:

Dipping a Toe into Open Source Development

I spent some time this weekend shaping my Gutter Icon code into a proper Github repo:

1. I took the class file and put it into a separate project.
2. I replaced the old namespace "SitecorePlayground" with the more official  sounding "SharedSource".
3. I serialized the Core content item that wires this up.
4. I created a package with the DLL and and the content item, and tested them in a blank solution.
5. I browsed among the various open source licences here and selected this one.
6. I put the whole thing on Github and added a Wiki.

Next step, getting it on trac.sitecore.net!  A fair bit of work for 20 lines of code, but quite satisfying.  Please comment if you end up using this in your Sitecore installation.  

Creating a Gutter Icon for Proxies

One of the true joys of Sitecore is the ease of customization.  We use proxies fairly extensively on our site, and a colleague recently complained that the Content Editor did not give a clear indication of whether an item is a proxy, and what is its source.  This inspired me to see if I could add a gutter icon to identify proxies, similar to the gutter clones icon that ships with Sitecore 6.4.   (The "gutter" is the area to the left of the content tree with icons, such as "My Locked Items", that can be toggled on and off.)  Like the clones icon, I wanted one that would navigate to the source item when clicked.  This is a fairly straightforward task, but I did have to lean on ReSharper's decompiler to see how the Sitecore guys built the clones icon.