I wanted to have a little play with XForms last night and have to say I was a little surprised.  Not necessarily with the complexity of displaying a form on a page, but with the lack of documentation about how to do it.  Now that I've figure out a method of displaying an XForm, I though I would share it in the home the less people suffer the problem in the future. First off, EPiServer has a page about developing with XForms which is worth a read, but it is by no means an exhaustive list of how to actually use an XForm. To get a form on your page, do the following (well, this is what I did an... [More]

I’m working on a new project at the moment and am aware that we’re probably going to have a fair few translations to do.  Our general approach at Interakting with regards to labels (i.e. static bits of text that are not content managed) is as follows: Create an Excel spreadsheet once we know what all of the labels in our final site are going to be with a tab for each control and page type.  This is a manual process carried out by some poor person reading the XML files in the project. Supply that spreadsheet to the customer/translation agency.  The afore mentioned ‘poor perso... [More]

A colleague of mine had some problems after recently upgrading an EPiServer site developed in Visual Studio 2005. The site he was developing was brought up to date by using Visual Studio 2008. After changing the web project build framework to .NET 3.5, the development machine compiled the site no problem. However the problem was that the STAGE Web.config file had not been updated with some extra entries that the upgrade wizard had put in. The error he was getting was highlighting the “this PageData data”, saying “Type expected”. public static class EPiServerExtensions { public stat... [More]

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 was recently working on an EPiServer solution and the client wanted to include an RSS feed on certain pages of their site.  I though I would write out here how I consumed the feed.  You’ll want to add error handling etc in here, as this is as rough as a tramps beard whilst being enough for you to get the point. The first thing I had to do was to find out how RSS is structured.  After a little Google search I found an article explaining the structure of RSS in sufficient detail for me to continue. The first thing that I did was create a struck to contain the configuration that I wanted, fai... [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]

I was recently working with a client to deploy an EPiServer site and we came across a rather strange problem. The EPiServer Manager installed fine, but when I tried to set up a web site (with a database or not it doesn't matter) we were getting the following error reported: System.InvalidOperationException: The installation failed, and the rollback has been performed. ---> System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070003)    at System.DirectoryServices.Interop.UnsafeNativeMethods.IAds.PutEx(Int32 lnControlCode, String bst... [More]

I've been thinking a bit about why EPiServer hits the 'sweet spot' for companies so nicely, and I think maybe the answer lies in its balance of feature coverage and market position. It knows where its strong point is - Content Management - but doesn't ignore the other areas. It also aims at the mid-market but is capable of scaling up or down, which is a sadly neglected approach. So many companies are being forced to choose between an self-declared 'Enterprise' solution or a self-confessed 'Entry Level' solution. Problem is, the Enterprise solutions are over-specified and over-priced for their ... [More]

I am currently working on a project where it was necessary to conditionally inject some content into certain properties on some pages. Dynamic Content didn't really help me because what I wanted to do was replace entire properties with content from a property on another page and do it in a nice way for the editor. Linking the page with a shortcut to another page didn't help me because it needed to be only a partial replace and also conditional. Here's an example - and I know there are better ways to do this but I want an example that won't compromise the Intellectual Property of what I am act... [More]

I needed to throw together a quick geolocalisation demo for EPiServer v5 R2 the other day and to do that it was necessary to override some of the default URL rewriting behaviour of EPiServer. I knew it could be done, but I'd never actually had to write a custom URL provider before, so Ted Nyberg's blog post on rewriting in EPiServer gave me a good kick-start. My geolocalisation changes worked a treat (maybe I'll blog about that another time) but I did come across one really nasty 'feature' in EPiServer. I did find a workaround though, so I'll share it with you. Some background first though. ... [More]

I've just managed to get the .NET 3.5 style of WCF Web Programming Model services to work inside an EPiServer 5 R2 site on IIS 7 and Windows 2008.  I had a few difficulties finding out how to integrate the new model into IIS/ASP.NET and then further problems getting it working in EPiServer.  Here, I outline the solution. Context I'm currently designing a site that will be using the Akamai Edge Suite of technologies (www.akamai.com) and so I desire that all client access is through the caching layer.  Additionally, I'm motivated towards a REST model for web services to support a greater degre... [More]

EPiServer Norway are associated with an EPiServer community project called EPiCode which had its annual awards on the 12th of November as part of the Christmas Tech Forum. I was really pleased to see the Module of the Year award went to my pals over at NetworkedPlanet for their EasySearch module. Unlike some of the other modules on EPiCode, it isn't free to use commercially - but it is free to download and try out and fills a nice gap in the EPiServer search space. A bunch of other 'active contributors' were lucky enough to get an iPod Shuffle in the awards - including me for contributing Clo... [More]

Introduction Interakting use both Open Source and proprietary products to deliver solutions for many companies. We always try to select the best tool for the job, and when it comes to Content Management it is no different. We have a range of tools we consider using including various Open Source tools (e.g. Nuxeo, DotNetNuke) and also our proprietary offerings (EPiServer, ADXSTUDIO). In the context of many projects it would certainly be possible to deliver a ‘successful’ project in either a proprietary or an Open Source solution. However, when we consider budgetary, functionality, deadline, su... [More]

I've just spent too long trying to upgrade EPiServer CMS 5 to SP2 but kept getting the following error: Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection. Turns out the problem was that EPiServerManager was pulling the connection string out of my web.config, but it appears it was ignoring the fact it specified an Integrated/Windows connection and was passing an empty SQL username to the database - hence the empty quote marks above. (cheers for your help Steve!) Solution: Temporarily change the SQL connection string in the site's web.config to... [More]

I've been hanging out on the #epicode IRC channel for the past few months, and over time I've played with several IRC clients such as XChat, Mibbit (for the Web) and HydraIRC. One of the things that you do most often on IRC is /msg people. The server that I use for #epicode is FreeNode. This server requires you to register you nick before doing a /msg. If you try to /msg without registering, you get an error message back from the server. XChat, annoyingly, didn't show me the IRC error and I spent quite some time trying to figure out what was wrong. Mibbit behaves nicely, but you have to enter ... [More]

Having stumbled across Google's Webmaster Tools a while ago it's been in the back of my mind to create a custom HttpHandler to dynamically create a (virtual) SiteMap.xml file that Google (and other search engines) can use as a reference when spidering my sites. I thought I'd share the basic implantation as a starting point. Ideally you'd add a property to each EPiServer PageType page for "change frequency" and "priority" which the sitemap generator would then use, but for this basic version I've simply set the homepage to 1.0 (the maximum priority) with a daily change, and all other pages to ... [More]

At the EPiServer Partner Summit I was chatting over dinner to Andy Brodie of Networked Planet. He was remarking that it would be nice within EPiServer to have the capability to show site thumbnails when you hovered over hyperlinks. This intrigued me so when I got back to the UK I did some investigation. There are sites on the internet that do provide a service for this, such as websnapr, but ideally I wanted something that I had full control over. Time to start coding :) After some investigation on the web I found a great article about the WebBrowser control and ASP.NET. I tailored it to my ... [More]