I spoke to a fellow MVP recently, Kern Herskind Nightingale and the topic of my blog came up, along with the fact that I hadn’t (at the time) updated for a while. Â The reason was my previous post about overriding rendering types. Originally, I had intended to use an example that would allow developers to add an interface to their sublayout classes and specify custom logic around building their cache keys. Continue reading Allowing sublayouts to control their own HTML cache keys
Month: October 2014
Sitecore Rendering Types
The topic of rendering types came up at the office the other day, and I wanted to write a quick post about them.  Rendering types are a group of classes that Sitecore uses to build up the controls on its pages using the presentation settings.  They handle the creation of the actual controls that Sitecore will use for rendering and allow for the Sitecore rendering engine to be extended.  You can use this mechanism to extend Sitecore by modifying how existing types of rendering work, or by adding your own custom rendering types.  This extension point can be useful for the times where you want to introduce functionality to Sitecore at a solution level; however I would typically recommend that you keep this to low-level functionality rather than high-level functionality, as your logic will be applied to every single rendering of your type in the solution, across all the websites. Continue reading Sitecore Rendering Types
Custom Sitecore Pipelines
Pipelines are a very useful feature in Sitecore, one that I make use of a great deal. I see a great many Sitecore website solutions that create their own processors to add to the existing pipelines (or which override existing pipeline processors), but I very rarely see solutions that have created their own pipelines. Usually I only see it in modules. I think that developers might be missing a trick, as there are a great many things that you can do with a simple pipeline and it provides easy extensibility throughout the project lifetime.
Pipelines, to my mind, should be used to solve a problem where you have (or will have) discrete pieces of logic that may be added to at any time. Often but not always, these operations occur in a particular order. There will usually also be one or more results of the pipeline that all of the operations will contribute toward in some way. Continue reading Custom Sitecore Pipelines