A Look at Sitecore Social Connected

Social Connected is a free module from Sitecore that allows websites to:

• Enable visitors to log in with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+
• Personalize content based on a visitor's social network profile
• Post messages to Facebook and Twitter timelines
• Capture DMS campaign and goal data on social network actions

The module was introduced in October 2011, and has gone through two upgrades, each of which significantly extended its functionality and usability.  The initial release allowed  log in and content related messages, version 1.1 added the ability to send messages directly to users based on DMS goals, and version 1.2, released in July 2012, presents impressive feedback on what happens to those messages, showing share, comment, and retweet activity, and evaluating the engagement value of users who come to site based on Like This and Tweet This links. The rate of introduction of new features shows Sitecore's commitment to the Customer Engagement vision announced at Dreamcore 2011, since it brings this notion of personalization and triggered action into the social networking space.  This post takes a look at how to set up the module, what it can do, and how it can be customized.

Pseudo TDD with CodeFiles and Exceptions

I'm working on a hefty solution that takes north of a minute to load after a compile.  Which is a killer for working through UI issues.

A SQL template for attaching Sitecore DBs

I've been doing some comparison analysis of different builds of Sitecore, and found myself creating a large number of throw-away installs locally. Attaching databases and giving rights was a bit of a nuisance, so I wrote a SQL Server Management Studio template. You can add this to your local SQL Server Management Studio by clicking Ctrl-T to open Template Explorer, and clicking New Template.

Using enums as constants

The other day I found myself having to add a value in to a dictionary with a number of constant keys. I started out with this:

//populating method:
dictionary["constant1"] = value1;
dicitonary["constant2"] = value2;
...
//consuming method:
value1 = dictionary["constant1"];
value2 = dictionary["constant2"];

Then I felt bad.