Sitecore CMS We study in Russian. Introduction

    imageGood afternoon, colleagues. I want to open on a hub a series of articles about Sitecore CMS. I’ll make a reservation right away, I’m not an employee of this company, I have been successfully creating various solutions using this CMS for more than 4 years, mainly for Danish customers. For me, the honor of being the discoverer of this series on the hub So, the first article will be about what Sitecore CMS is and a brief description of the features, as well as I will answer questions for what tasks and which companies this product is suitable for.
    It is worth mentioning that Sitecore as a company actually produces several products besides CMS, including Sitecore Intranet Portal (SIP) - an intranet scripting solution, Sitecore Foundry, a product for multisite solutions, as well as several modules and integrations for e-commerce, e-mail campaign management systems, web forms (Web Forms for Marketers). A complete list of Sitecore products can be found here: http://www.sitecore.net/Products.aspx
    One of the most interesting additions, perhaps, is that CMS also includes a product for web analytics - DMS (digital marketing system) , and it combines with CMS in one package called CEP (customer engagement platform): http://www.sitecore.net/Products/Customer-Engagement-Platform.aspx
    Thus, Sitecore offers a full range of tools for conducting modern and effective e-marketing. But for this series of posts I will limit myself to one product, or rather, the platform on which it is all built, Sitecore CMS.
    What is a CMS?

    Content management software (CMS) is software that helps non-technical professionals manage the content of web applications without understanding the technical details. Sitecore CMS
    uses the ASP.NET platform and runs under IIS, which opens up a huge number of opportunities for technicians to develop virtually any web application.
    Now there are many different CMS solutions. Both paid and free, Sitecore CMS is of the 1st type, and is mainly aimed at working with large customers, although a free version ( http://xpress.sitecore.net/ ) is available for both developers and end users. use both to study the platform and to blog.
    In the corporate market, the main competitors are such major players as SDL, Adobe, Ektron, and several others. This can be judged by the graph from the report of the company Gartner , where Sitecore is positioned as a leader.

    A full report with a detailed description can be found here:
    www.sitecore.net/Resources/whitepapers/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant.aspx
    If you look at the company's customers, then you can see international companies such as Toshiba, Siemens, KIA, Mazda, Canon , Nestle, Microsoft, Danish government sites. See the full list here: www.sitecore.net/Customers.aspx .
    As you can see, the customer portfolio is quite wide. I think the number and size of customers speaks for itself.
    Introduction to Sitecore CMS

    Sitecore CMS is a high-performance, scalable, extensible ASP.NET CMS that is not restrictive in technologies for generating custom markup. You can use all the technologies currently available, such as XHTML, HTML5, CSS, jQuery, JSON, XML, etc.
    A short list of features:
    • Flexible, hierarchical data warehouse (you can use SQL Server or Oracle).
    • Simple and intuitive API for technicians
    • The ability to configure and expand through the expansion of pipelines provided, event handling, etc.
    • An engine that dynamically collects and caches management components, which helps create code reuse solutions.
    • The concept of display devices (device management) - allows you to create different display pages for different clients (browser, PDF, printer, XML feed) or for mobile devices.
    • Security, including authentication, authorization, roles and management profiles, is implemented using ASP.NET Membership Services.
    • Providing a workflow (Workflow) and the separation of content into published and unpublished.
    • Visual comparison of differences between versions of content (content), including individual fields.
    • Media Library (Media Library) for storing any type of unstructured data and files.
    • Close integration with Visual Studio 2010 IDE ( Sitecore Rocks

    First start

    Just add / sitecore / login to your website address, for example:
    localhost / sitecore / login and you will be taken to the login page, (Default login: admin password: b)

    where several login options will be available. I recommend immediately using the Desktop mod, it will provide you with more options, such as the banal opening of several windows, and expanded access to various settings and utilities, which will be discussed below:

    Some built-in utilities of Sitecore CMS:
    • Content Editor - the main tool for editing content
    • Developer Center - browser-based IDE for editing presentation components
    • Template Manager - an environment for managing templates, which are essentially data types
    • Control Panel - system management and personal settings.
    • Media Library - multimedia library editor where any files such as images and videos are stored
    • Security Editor - management of access rights to elements for users and roles
    • Preview - viewing content, with the ability to view versions at a time in the past as well as in the future
    • Debugger - activate the built-in debugger to analyze pages, including their performance
    • Workbox - workflow management
    • Access Viewer - view effective security settings
    • Role Manager - Security Role Management
    • User Manager - management of CMS users and the ability to identify visitors to published sites
    • Package Designer - creating packages for migrating content and files from one environment to another.
    • Installation Wizard - installer of packages created in Package Designer
    • File Explorer - shows physical paths to documents
    • Log Viewer - view the event log
    • Broken Links - Managing Broken Object Links

    As you can see, there are a lot of standard utilities, and I do not use some in my personal experience. For example, it is much more convenient to open the log files directly from the disk than to use the Log Viewer, although this application is useful if you do not have direct access to the disk, for example, on a remote server.
    I would also like to note that the developer is also allowed to embed their applications for the system depending on the needs of the client / customer, as well as expand existing ones. Most applications are built on XAML technology, which allows you to modify any aspect of embedded applications quite easily. We will talk about this in one of the following articles.
    Developer Resources

    For the developers of Sitecore CMS, a very powerful network has been created, which is available at sdn.sitecore.net, and also for licensed customers organized round-the-clock support. The network has a large number of specialists who lead their interesting blogs about developing on Sitecore in English. Here is an rss feed containing all blogs:
    http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ZsFOz4a62xG9Py3Idbq02Q&_render=rss
    In addition to the official forum, many use StackOverflow:
    stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sitecore
    Another useful resource Is a library of free shared source modules (over 100):
    http://trac.sitecore.net/Index
    If you have an SVN client, you can download the code of any module!
    In addition to these resources, Sitecore provides training for both developers and users at various levels:
    http://www.sitecore.net/Support/Training.aspx
    conclusions

    As you can see, Sitecore is a very large and powerful player in the CMS market (WCMS), which provides tremendous opportunities for both end users and developers. I recommend that you pay attention to this product and read my further more technical notes about the intricacies and nuances of development for Sitecore CMS.
    PS
    This and subsequent posts are designed for developers who are interested in corporate content management systems, Sitecore CMS in particular, and who want to learn about the internal structure and specifics of this CMS. I hope you find this information useful for your professional purposes, since the development market for Sitecore CMS is growing by leaps and bounds, and knowledge of this technology can help to get an interesting project, for example. Well, if not, then at least expand the range of your knowledge and skills.
    Write, ask questions both in PM and in the comments. I will be glad to hear.

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