matthewkenny.com » sitecore

Setting Sitecore ImageField

Matthew Kenny — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:10:28 +0000

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.

Originally I tried setting the media ID and the media path properties, but that didn’t quite work. Eventually I found that you have to set the media ID, media path, source, and a custom attribute (“showineditor“). I was surprised that it wasn’t easier to assign a media file to an ImageField object, but that’s easily resolved using extension methods introduced in .Net 3.5. For the lazier among us, I’ve included a small snippet of code that does the important stuff. This code is written for Sitecore 5.3, but should work on Sitecore 6.x with minor tweaking if some nicer methods haven’t already been put in place. Obviously, production code should be made a bit robust than what’s below, which has no exception handling and assumes the item is already in editing mode.

public void AssignMediaItem(ImageField field, Item mediaItem)
{
    field.MediaID = mediaItem.ID;
    MediaUrlOptions options = new MediaUrlOptions();
    field.Src = MediaManager.GetMediaUrl(mediaItem, options);
    field.MediaPath = mediaItem.Paths.MediaPath;
    field.SetAttribute("showineditor", "1");
}

Sitecore v6.0

Matthew Kenny — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:40:42 +0000

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.

Version 6 brings some excellent new features to the table; some which have been present in many other CMS products and others which are pretty unique. I’m looking forward to working with it in July/August, which is when I’ve been scheduled to redevelop the bit10 website (the final designs for which have been described as “funky but clean”). We’ll see how it goes; expect to hear more on the topic of Sitecore when the project is done.

Matt Gets Certified

Matthew Kenny — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:10:27 +0000

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.

In the meantime, there’s one large Sitecore project which I’m due to start development on in coming weeks; so I’m looking forward to doing some actual work with it.

I think I might start looking at some proper accreditations in the near future, as they can only help my career prospects, and I think they’d really be quite interesting. The question is whether I’ll have to cough up the money myself or if it will be covered under CPD…