I’m sure that, like a lot of people working with EPiServer I have a play area that I use to try things out and start off any proof of concept work that I’m going to be implementing later on in  various projects.  For this, I use the SDK Installation of EPiServer CMS along with an instance of the Visual Studio Web Server when my laptop boots up so that it’s always running. Today, I wanted to have a play with Composer with a view to knowing enough about it to be able to get sign-off some projects that can use it.  First thing is just install it and see what happens.  There were some pretty good... [More]

Now that I get to use EPiServer CMS v5, I’m having approximately 165.3% more fun that I was with version 4.6.  I can actually find information about 5 easily on the internet, brilliant!  What I do find dismally disappointing though is the state of the SDK.  A great deal of it just lists methods or properties with no description.  In honesty, I can find out more using reflector.net. While I appreciate that the guys at EPiServer are doing some great work delivering a brilliant set of tools for us to work with, I can’t help but think that someone should be updating the SDK with a little more vig... [More]

I’ve been working on a couple of things lately in EPiServer that I want to be able to easily re-use on other projects.  From my point of view that means just dropping DLLs in folders and letting EPiServer do as much of the work as possible.  One of my little pieces  of functionality needs to happen when a page has been published.  There are a couple of ways to do this, and previously I have been doing it in globla.ascx.  Today I cam across an blog by Allen Thraen on discussing the subject of how to register DataFactory event handlers in EPiServer which describes in much better detail than I ca... [More]

I often get asked to provide a handy starting guide to new people joining the company/team.  It's pretty straight forward to find on the EPiServer World site if you look under the Get Started tab. Just follow the link to Start Developing with EPiServer CMS 5 R2 for some articles explaining the basics and video presentations too. I would also recommend having a look at Relate+, which is a great addition to EPiServer CMS for building community-themed web sites.  Again, there is some useful documentation about this in the Get Started tab under Start Developing with Relate+. Enjoy!

I'm still fairly new to EPiServer, so I'm going through the process of a great many rookie errors whilst taking over a site from someone with vastly more knowledge of the product than me. One issue I had recently was when I was creating a new stage server for a client so that they could test things out.  I went through a cobbled route of copying their live DB and live code and slapping them on to of a clean EPiServer install and hacking about in the web.config file to get it all working.  The in itself was a piece of cake. I started getting problems when the AD users could not connect tot he... [More]