X3 Forums & Community Support

I'm currently working on a large site implementation involving the new x3 functionality. It has been great learning the capabilities of x3 however I miss the community support that is available with EPiServer.

So I had a chat to a couple of people and for those out there who are working with x3, you'll be happy to hear there will be a restructure of the EPiServer world forums to accommodate the new package structure and x3 will sit somewhere within this with Create+. This should be happening sometime after the summer.

In the meantime I will be posting here my learnings from developing with x3. If anybody has any comments, suggestions or links to other x3 developer blogs then please share with us.

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• Report Center; various reports including unpublished pages, published by me, modified pages, expiring/expired pages.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

EPiServer Partner Summit 2008

I know it's a bit late but as promised I've written up some notes on the EPiServer Partner Summit 08. Just a few bullet points on some of the interesting topics. This is more for those that couldn't make it and a refresher for myself.


Overview and Roadmap

The new product focus areas

• Core
• Connectors - sharepoint, CRM, salesforce etc
• Packages (see below)
• Content Creation/Admin - user centric, power & simplicity
• Enterprise Functionality - enterprise content integration, high performance

Three new product packages; Create+, Relate+ and Engage+ containing both EPiServer and EPiMore products but all supported through EPiServer.

Create+
X3, ImageVault, Interactive Scene, EPiServer Mail

Relate+
EPiCommunity, EPiMail, Connect for Sharepoint, EPiServer MSN, Tag clouds, Personal Presentation

Engage+
Warm website tools
Action Channel

Also coming

• Enhancements to EPiStore and EPiBooking
• EPiServer community
• EPiMore future focus areas; mobile, e-commerce, translation, reporting, SEO, search

Update

I have to apologise as this blog has been rather quiet for awhile. As most of you that read this blog know (since I met with you in Sweden last week!) I have accepted a position with EPiServer UK. It's a great opportunity for me and I have already learnt so much in the month I have been there, including working with my first implementation of x3.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the EPiServer partner summit in Stockholm. It was a great 4 days with some interesting sessions and a lot of networking. It was fantastic meeting up with a lot of people I have talked with but never met. It's always nice finally meeting in person. And I appreciated all those that chatted with me for the first time and answered my various questions. I will be posting some excerpts from the conference soon but I actually jumped on here because I found a neat tool that I just had to mention.

If you ever come across the frustrating situation where you have a VS 2008 solution you just want to have a look at and you only have VS 2005 installed but you really don't have the time to try and source out VS 2008 (or can't install on the machine) for whatever reason you can use this nifty tool: http://home.hot.rr.com/graye/Articles/ProjectConverter.htm
It's simply a converter that converts your solution files from 08 back to 05. How handy... :)

The Next Adventure

Sadly, today is my last day at Intergen. I am embarking on my big OE and will be leaving New Zealand in just over a week. My adventures begin in South East Asia (Thailand & Vietnam) before I arrive in London at the end of April.

So this blog is going to be very quiet for a little while till I'm settled down again. If you want to keep up with my travels you can find my personal travel blog here: http://racheltravel.blogspot.com/

Once I have landed in London I will be looking for contract work, preferably in the EPiServer space. If you know of any positions available feel free to message me through my msn link on the side of this blog. Location is not an issue, I am happy to work anywhere in the UK.

I just want to also say a big thank you to everyone out there who has been reading my blog and who have supported me over the last few years.

Talk again soon
Rachel

Error during setup

Was involved in the recent setup of an EPiServer test VM and during installation of a sample site we were getting this error on the setup page when it loads the browser:

Exception: Unable to generate a temporary class (result=1). error CS2001: Source file 'C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\tc4s4ocu.0.cs' could not be found error CS2008: No inputs specified []


Determined the error was due to a permissions problem which caused the file not to be placed in the temp directory in the first place. We needed to ensure that the local asp.net account had read/write permissions to C:\Windows\temp

Menus & EPi5

In older versions of EPiServer it was difficult to create menus based on clean nested lists e.g.

<ul>
<li></li>
<li></li>
<ul class="selected">
<li></li>
<li class="selected"></li>
</ul>
<li></li>
<ul>

In the past I utilised code for a custom menu control I found on the developer forums (apologies, I can not find the link again so cannot reference it here).

However, now in EPi 5 the Page Tree control contains two new templates which makes creating these types of menus a breeze:

Check out <IndentTemplate> and <UnindentTemplate> within the PageTree control