EPiServer Developer Summit 2008

The Friday of the Partner Summit we split off for a full day developer summit which I thoroughly enjoyed. There were some really good sessions and some great speakers. Below is an overview of a few I went to.

For more information you can download the presentations from the partner site here: http://partner.episerver.com/News-Events/Events/Past-events/Partner-Summit-2008-Presentations/

Don't forget to checkout the photos and video while you're there too!

What's New in EPiServer CMS 5 R2 (Roger Wirz)

• Lots of editorial changes
• Can now perform form management in Firefox & Mac
• Added features to help manage and sort forms
• New form builder layout; can import & export forms, ability to export as xml and modify.
• Advances to image editor; inbuilt cropping, resizing, flip, rotate, greyscale etc
• Dynamic content; feed properties and content from somewhere else, can build own plug-in types
• Report Center; various reports including unpublished pages, published by me, modified pages, expiring/expired pages. Plug in area so can add your own reports.
• Content Channels; can bulk update data in EPiServer e.g. xml data with schema
• Convert page type
• Custom page provider; enterprise feature only, can have content stored outside of EPiServer database, e.g. stored as xml. Can build your own page providers.

Migrating to EPi5 (Johan Bjornfot)

Migrating Areas

• Data, File Systems, Page templates, custom properties

Prerequisites

• Must be 4.62 and target must be CMS 5 SP2
• SQL Server 2005
• Form properties must be converted to XForms

Conversion Times

• Object store - ~30 mins / 10,000 obj
• Native file system - ~ 10 mins / 1 GB
• Link migration - ~25 mins / 10,000 pages (more for translation pages)

What can't be migrated

• Oracle based sites
• Users and access rights
• Mirroring state
• Workflows

Performance Troubleshooting (Steve Celius)

80% of download time usually comes from client site

Finding slow areas

• Analyse IIS logs (check time_taken, num requests per min, Visual Log Parser)
• Fiddler
• Performance Monitor (check cpu, req/s & req queue)
• JetBrains dotTrace Profiler
  

Large List Problem

• Large collection of pages kills performance
• Dynamic properties take up loads of performance

Solution

• Split up page lists to less than 250 per subtree
  
• Cache the list
• Limit dynamic properties
• Less of a problem in EPiServer CMS 5

Find pages with criteria is most resource intensive operation.

• Cache results from these and other queries. Check out Steve's CacheFramework.
• Use output caching
• Cache is invalidated on page publishing

Site Maintenance Using Windows Workflow Foundation (Johan Bjornfot)

Built an example workflow sending tasks between two sites, a source site and a translation site.
Used contentChannel to push pages between the two sites.

Built a second example workflow that searches for pages about to be unpublished and gives the owner the chance to extend it.
You can set a time limit between loops in WWF
Can debug workflow through normal web process

Content Channel & Page Providers (Magnus Strale)

Content Channel

• Import pages and files
• Allows one way updating
• Requires configuration
• Pages and files

Page Providers

• Data resides in original store
• Fully integrated in EPiServer
• LocalPageProvider and RemotePageProvider in EPi CMS R2
• Requires Enterprise license
• Requires coding and configuration
• Pages only

Sharepoint Connector

• One way communication initiated by sharepoint
• No support for access rights
• GUI for configuration