Author: Matthew Kenny

Sitecore Patch Files

As anyone familiar with Sitecore’s guide of recommended practices, changing the <sitecore> section of the Web.config file directly is frowned upon.  Rather, developers should use things called Sitecore configuration include files, or patch files.  By default, these are stored in the /App_Config/Includes folder of the website.

There are plenty of blog articles about them on the internet, however there was one specific feature that seems to be relatively unknown: the set namespace. Continue reading Sitecore Patch Files

Setting Sitecore ImageField

Update: this post uses an older version of the Sitecore API. For an up-to-date solution, please see this updated article.

Recently I had to write something to allow users to upload their own content on a Sitecore site. Not an unusual, or especially difficult, piece of functionality but one thing that did give me a bit of trouble was associating uploaded images (in the media library) with the Sitecore item’s image field. Continue reading Setting Sitecore ImageField

Quick Update

So, I thought I’d ease into what will (hopefully) be another flurry of posting activity with a quick update on what’s been going on here recently.  If you’ve read through earlier posts on this blog then you may well know that I started working at bit10 in September 2007.  I’ve had a fantastic time working at bit10; I’ve learned a great deal and met many people with whom I’m hoping to keep in contact.  However, as with all things, I think that it’s become time to move on. Continue reading Quick Update

Back on the ‘Net

After almost a month I’m finally back on the internet.  I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, I might finally get back to posting at some point soon.

Right now I’ve got a fair bit on my plate as I’m currently following up a couple of issues with my new place with the lettings agent which are dragging along somewhat, but not to the point where I want to go into details on here at the moment.

House Move

In case anyone’s been wondering why I’ve been a bit quiet recently, it’s just because I’ve moved house and haven’t managed to get internet sorted at my new place yet.  Once I get myself back online, I should be able to resume normal posting.  When that’s going to be depends on the irritatingly recalcitrant BT.

Overactive Akismet

I’ve always really ignored the comment moderation queue, generally trusting Akismet to filter out the spam and only let real comments through.  I’ve actually been very pleased with it as it has stopped comment spam coming through, which was initially quite a nuisance.  This evening though (as I currently can’t get to sleep) I decided to have a look through the comments that Akismet has marked as spam. Continue reading Overactive Akismet

IE8 “feature comparison”

I’ll admit straight up that I haven’t really used IE8.  I’ll also happily concede that IE8 is probably a good deal better at rendering standards-compliant things than IE6 and IE7.  I’m also happy that with the release of IE8, the death of IE6 is that little bit closer (something that will make any web developer happy, I believe).  I have to say, though, that I was highly disappointed by Microsoft when they released this article.  I feel it’s sad that whoever wrote the article felt that IE8 could not stand on its own merits and so had to do some, ah, creative spinning of the truth to promote it instead.

Sitecore v6.0

Yesterday I took my “upgrade” certification exam to upgrade my Sitecore 5.3 certification that I obtained last August to to the recently released version 6.0. Sitecore is a highly adaptable and extremely powerful CMS that bit10 chose as its CMS of choice.  After reviewing a fair number of competing offerings (including Amaxus and Ektron), we found Sitecore to be a superior offering. Continue reading Sitecore v6.0

ASP.Net MVC Framework – Initial Thoughts

Having just completed a relatively large project using the newly released ASP.Net MVC Framework, I thought this would be a good time to post my thoughts on the framework.  I have to say that the bulk of my experience with MVC framework comes from my time using Ruby on Rails, so many of my perceptions will be coloured by this. Continue reading ASP.Net MVC Framework – Initial Thoughts

Chocolate Brownies

After doing a bit of baking this weekend I came up with an – if I do say so myself – especially good batch of chocolate brownies.  I thought that I’d share the recipe on here because I know that not everyone who reads this blog is interested in the techie stuff… and they really are delicious. Continue reading Chocolate Brownies

TinyMCE and jQuery validation

I’ve recently been working on a project using the ASP.Net MVC framework (more on that in a later post perhaps), where the TinyMCE editor was used as the rich text input method of choice. We hit a snag when it came to applying client-side validation through jQuery: jQuery was validating the textarea before TinyMCE was filling it in with the editor content.
Continue reading TinyMCE and jQuery validation

PHP4, IIS6 and 64-bit Windows 2003 Server

If anyone had asked me how to put these three things together a week ago, I would have cringed; my next reaction would be to suggest upgrading to PHP5, using Apache, and one flavour or another of Linux.  Unfortunately that wasn’t possible at this point so, armed with the usual developer tools (that is, the F1 key and Google), I set out to get things set up… after all, how hard could it be?
Continue reading PHP4, IIS6 and 64-bit Windows 2003 Server

Matt Gets Certified

Being my first “official” certification, I figured I’d give it a mention.  A couple of weeks ago I got sent down to London to do some developer training for a CMS that we’re going to be using quite a bit at the company I work at.  At some point, there’s also going to be some interesting work porting existing customer sites to the Sitecore platform.
Continue reading Matt Gets Certified

Lovefilm

I recently got a 90 day trial membership on Lovefilm.  If you haven’t heard of Lovefilm before, it’s an online DVD rental service where they post the discs out to you and you send them back (keeping them for as long as you want in between).  The trick to it is that you can only have a certain number of DVDs at your house at any one point, so that gets you to send them back (which is free).

Even though I’m not paying for it, it’s definitely well worth the money that they charge for the normal plans.  It’s great coming home and knowing that you’ve got something to watch that you haven’t seen before.  The choice of films is great, and as long as you get plenty of films on your “to rent” list, you’ll never be stuck without.

I think there’s a perpetual 30 day free trial offer on as well, check it out.