Skip to main content

Sitecore Sidekick

One of the struggles with any CMS is how to move content from one enviornment to another. Each CMS tends to have its own flavor of how to do this. With Tridion you have the content porter for better or worse, often worse. With Sitecore you have a few options between Unicorn and Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) and a few others. Both Unicorn and TDS are focused on moving content out to production. What I mean by that is they are really good and moving content item from development out to production. They don't really support the use case of bring content items from production or other higher level enviornments down to lower level environments. So what do we do with that content authors create in production that we would like to seem in all enviornments and make standard in our deployments? This is where Sidekick comes in.

Jeff Darchuk has created a great little plugin to Sitecore called Sidekick. This plugin makes it really easy, and fast, to copy anything from one environment to another environment. The tool will even tell you want is out of sync between the source and destination environments.  

Now keep in mind you probably don't want all your production content checed into soruce control and deployed to every environment. That might cause some unneeded bloat in your solution and deployments. But for those core use cases where you need to keep some content in sync with production Sidekick to the rescue.

Jeff's site has all you need to know to get started using Sidekick. He has also been very responsive to issues logged in GitHub. Just launch Sidekick and have it pull in content from an environment. Unicorn and TDS can then pick that new content up from your local development instance and serialize it into your source control.

Sidekick even connects into Sitecore's scheduler so you can schedule syncs! Ever have an environment you want to keep in sync, like a User Acceptance Test (UAT) or a production shadow copy? Sidekick might help you there as it can keep the content trees in sync via scheduling.

All in all we have found this to be a pretty great tool to help solve some of this use cases around syncing content. Hope you find it useful!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Uniting Testing Expression Predicate with Moq

I recently was setting up a repository in a project with an interface on all repositories that took a predicate. As part of this I needed to mock out this call so I could unit test my code. The vast majority of samples out there for mocking an expression predicate just is It.IsAny<> which is not very helpful as it does not test anything other then verify it got a predicate. What if you actually want to test that you got a certain predicate though? It is actually pretty easy to do but not very straight forward. Here is what you do for the It.IsAny<> approach in case someone is looking for that. this .bindingRepository.Setup(c => c.Get(It.IsAny<Expression<Func<UserBinding, bool >>>())) .Returns( new List<UserBinding>() { defaultBinding }.AsQueryable()); This example just says to always return a collection of UserBindings that contain “defaultBinding” (which is an object I setup previously). Here is what it looks like when you want to pass in an exp

Anatomy of Sitecore Business Rule - Macros

In previous posts, we talked about  field syntax and the basic structure of business rules . This time we are going to dive into macros in the business rules. Macros are used as part of the business rule syntax. The syntax looks like this and calls for 4 parameters. [Property to set, Operator/Macro, AdditionalParameters, Display text]. When I first started working with business rules the difference between operator and macro was confusing. To add to this confusion some of the out-of-the-box macros are named with the term "operator" (like ListOperator who's configuration points to a class called ListMacro and the class implements IRuleMacro). Anything under the path /sitecore/system/Settings/Rules/Definitions/Macros should be a macro and should implement IRuleMacro. Macros have the follow characteristics: They inherit the IRuleMacro interface The interface requires this execute method void Execute(XElement element, string name, UrlString parameters, string value)

Experience Profile Anonymous, Unknown and Known contacts

When you first get started with Sitecore's experience profile the reporting for contacts can cause a little confusion. There are 3 terms that are thrown around, 1) Anonymous 2) Unknown 3) Known. When you read the docs they can bleed into each other a little. First, have a read through the Sitecore tracking documentation to get a feel for what Sitecore is trying to do. There are a couple key things here to first understand: Unless you call " IdentifyAs() " for request the contact is always anonymous.  Tracking of anonymous contacts is off by default.  Even if you call "IdentifyAs()" if you don't set facet values for the contact (like first name and email) the contact will still show up in your experience profile as "unknown" (because it has no facet data to display).  Enabled Anonymous contacts Notice in the picture I have two contacts marked in a red box. Those are my "known" contacts that I called "IdentifyAs"

Excel XIRR and C#

I have spend that last couple days trying to figure out how to run and Excel XIRR function in a C# application. This process has been more painful that I thought it would have been when started. To save others (or myself the pain in the future if I have to do it again) I thought I would right a post about this (as post about XIRR in C# have been hard to come by). Lets start with the easy part first. In order to make this call you need to use the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel dll. When you use this dll take note of what version of the dll you are using. If you are using a version less then 12 (at the time of this writing 12 was the highest version) you will not have an XIRR function call. This does not mean you cannot still do XIRR though. As of version 12 (a.k.a Office 2007) the XIRR function is a built in function to Excel. Prior version need an add-in to use this function. Even if you have version 12 of the interop though it does not mean you will be able to use the function. The

Windows Workflow Unit Testing

I know people have very mixed opinions about Windows Workflow and, to be honest, so do I. Really I am not even sure if it has much of a future given the little attention Microsoft has given it. However, despite all that and rather your like it or not there are times when you may use it and want to unit test it. The question is how? Well there are not a lot of options but there is one, that for me, has proven valuable. People tend to use Windows Workflow in a few different ways, so first let me explain how I have use it most. I have never really used it where I programmatically created and instantiate of my own workflow. For me it has pretty much all been using the Windows Workflow designer and using IIS as my workflow host. Then inside those XAML workflows I have custom activities I create and need to test. Do to this I have found one tool that does this pretty well and pretty easy. Microsoft Activities Unit Testing It is an old framework but it still gets the job done. There is