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These beginner tutorials assume that you have no previous of experience of, or with, Sitecore. These guides have been laid out in a manner that will take you from an introduction of what Sitecore is, to helpin gyou install Sitecore on your computer and then finally onto some theory, so you can create your first page within Sitecore.
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Starting Sitecore CMS development can be a very daunting task. If you want to learn Sitecore, or, you work for a company that is interested in Sitecore and you don’t really understand what it is and why you should use it, then this page will hopefully get you on the first rung of the ladder. You are never too old or too young to learn a new CMS. Learning Sitecore isn’t as hard as you think.
This guide was written as a gentle introduction to Sitecore. Everything in here is light reading and you should be able to get through it all in less than an hour. This guide doesn’t cover any hardcore code samples (that will come later) but simply aims to help yo understand how Sitecore can benefit your business and how to install it.
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Sitecore’s architecture is different than it’s competitors and understanding how it works should be your first point of call. Sitecore pages are build up of data templates, layouts and renderings and in order to work with Sitecore you will need to understand this.
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This section of the site covers the Sitecore API. The majority of your pages will need to interact with the Sitecore API so understanding what’s available to you, how to get and store data from Sitecore is a vital part of any project.
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Sitecore is extremely configurable and has a variety of different settings that can be tweaked and changed. This guide isn’t aimed at detailing every tiny detail imaginable, but, aims to provide you easy to follow instruction about how to get up and running with some of the basic tasks.
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MVC, or, Model-View-Controller is an architectural pattern that’s been around since the 70’s that helps split your website code into three main layers, Model, View, and Controller. MVC is a big step up over traditional asp.NET web forms. MVC pattern forces a separation of concerns within your website. This separation makes things like unit testing, maintenance and writing code easier. MVC helps to separate your C# logic within the HTML, CSS, and JS presentation code.
Sitecore allows you to build your website with either MVC or Webforms, even though web forms is so inferior companies are still using is.. if you are new to Umbraco then my advice is… DO NOT USE WEB FORMS FOR NEW PROJECTS! Sitecore MVC can even be configured to work with ASP.NET Web Forms side by side and you can switch between them from request to request. If you have inherited an old Umbraco website and you don’t want to start from scratch, you can slowly refactor it, into more modern architecture.
The main difference between Sitecore MVC and traditional ASP.NET MVC is that Sitecore adds some special hooks and routes into the MVC pipeline that allows it to render Umbraco virtual pages, instead of pages based on controllers and actions. Sitecore MVC can be configured to work with standard MVC controllers and actions is you want it to, so it really is a very powerful platform that will allow you to do pretty much anything you can in a standard MVC website combined with the power of what Umbraco can deliver.
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This is the section where things start to get a little more exciting, from this point onwards we’re going to roll up our sleeves and start writing some code. This aim of this guide is to start from the beginning and it assumes that you haven’t had any experience in breaking up a design into Sitecore components at all. In the first article, I’ll explain how Sitecore makes managing your companies website easier and how to split a design/HTML page into website components.
Before we begin, I should probably point out that this guide isn’t the best way to create a Sitecore page. When you start Sitecore development full-on there are a number of developer Tools, like Sitecore Rocks that allows you to do a lot of the steps listed in this guide directly from Visual Studio, rather than within Sitecore itself. Using Sitecore Rocks makes your life a lot easier, however, it I would recommend you understand how the process works in Sitecore itself, as that knowledge will be very beneficial to you.
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These guides will cover everything you may need for your day-to-day needswhen workign withSitecore CMS.
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The section will show you how you can customize the Sitecore editor to make it work for you.
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This section is a living section of errors I’ve encountered along the way and the fixes that helped me get back up and running.
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As of Sitecore 9, Sitecore is installed via Powershell. If you need to install anything below version 9, then this section has you covered. In here, you will learn how to install Sitecore to get it up and running on your PC.
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Sitecore rocks is a Visual Studio add-on that will make you a more efficient Sitecore developer. This section discusses some of the features of Sitecore Rocks and how to use them.
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A lot of people new to Sitecore, struggle to get their head around how it works. One area a lot of people struggle with in particular is the differences between how a normal MVC website works and how a Sitecore website works. Understanding how the Sitecore pipeline works, how pages are loaded, what parameters are passed around behind the scenes, etc… will make your life a lot easier. This section will hopefully help you gain this understanding.
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Deploying code and content between environments can be a tedious process until TDS came along. TDS allows developers to easily deploy Sitecore items between environments.
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Sitecore has a number of really good third-party tools that you can leverage to make your development and deployments a lot more streamlined and efficient. This section reviews these tools and explains what you should consider investing in and how to use them.
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As developers, we all hit hurdles from time to time. This section covers advice and battle proved techniques to help you figure out what’s gone wrong in your website and how to get it working again.
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Writing well tested and reliable code should be the aim of every developer who works with Sitecore. This section covers some of the techniques to write unit tests within Sitecore.
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Upgrading Sitecore can be a painful and long-winded experience. As Sitecore doesn’t use Nuget a lot of the upgrade process is still very manual. If you need to upgrade Sitecore then m advice is to follow the upgrade guide step-by-step. Don’t try ad miss anything out to save on time, as the only thing that will happen will be an email to Sitecore support. This section covers all the various bits and bobs you need to do in order to upgrade Sitecore.
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Every CMS solution comes with a forms plug-in that allows content editors to add web forms into their web pages. Sitecore version is called web forms for marketers. This section covers everything WFFM.