SUGCON Europe 2019

I attended the SUGCON event in 2019 and thought I'd jot down my thoughts on the various presentations I went to as well as some overall thoughts about the conference in general. I have a lot more to say about the talks I attended on day 2 for some reason, maybe the talks were structured that way, maybe I had just had more coffee. Below are my breakdowns for both days and then my thoughts on a few things in general.

Restricting the number of times a rendering can be added to a placeholder

This is another one of those tasks that shouldn't really be necessary to do. Every time a client says "We don't want two of these components added to this placeholder" my answer is always "So don't add two." It's a people problem that companies want solved with technology. This solution is geared more toward the use of the Experience Editor and it is going to stop a rendering appearing in the "Select a rendering" dialog if it already exists in that placeholder the maximum number of times.

Post-Processing html after it has been generated in Sitecore

Sometimes we might want to do an operation on the entire html generated for a page, such as move elements around, do some text replacements or regex-based url amendments.  The MVC framework has various features like action filters, result filters and so on, but we can't really use these with Sitecore the same way we would a native MVC site.  In traditional MVC your page is the result of a single action, but in Sitecore it is lots of actions stitched together so there is a little more work to do, so let's get started.

Restricting the number of sub items in Sitecore

In this blog I will be showing a technique that lets us use the Sitecore Rules Engine to restrict how many sub-items an item can have. This restriction is fully configurable and can be based on template types, path locations, item names or any other condition you would like to define.

Managing CSS files in Sitecore

This article shows how you can manage CSS files in Sitecore. This is one of those techniques that I don't exactly recommend as it shouldn't really be needed, but sometimes it can be a compromise to allow front-end designers to modify CSS on the fly. One of the advantages of doing this is that having Sitecore drive your CSS means your CSS can also follow the restricted publication process allowing your CSS to change depending on the date. I was working on a site that had a "deal of the day" where each day had a different offer and that offer was reflected on the home page. This technique allowed the designer to version the home page for each day, and also version the css tweaks for each day and set up the site for the whole week in advance. On each morning we simply did a publish and the publish restrictions we'd set up on the versions meant the homepage and css reflected that day's deal.

Note that the css for the majority of the site was still handled in css files, the css that we made driven from Sitecore contained only slight modifications the designer wanted so that buttons looked different, fonts for some components were different and so on.

Design issues with Sitecore sites

When building a website most companies tend to have designers, or front-end developers, that are fairly hands-on.  Not only do they do the actual site designs but they do the html\css too and sometimes the javascript if needed, or the implementation of any javascript frameworks that are used.  It's also not unusual for this to be the company's first Sitecore solution and all of these things can create their own challenges which I'm going to talk about in this blog.  It's not all technical issues though, it often comes down to politics and people management too.

MVC Validation with Sitecore

MVC comes with a validation framework that supports both server-side and client-side validation with very little coding.  You can still use this framework with Sitecore MVC if you wish, but it breaks a few fundamental aspects of content management systems, namely that the error messages you use won't be content editable as they are embedded in your code.  This article shows how we can use the built-in MVC framework and also allow the messages to be content manageable, and also multi-lingual.