Sitecore: Powerful but mystifying

My Quickflix project (codenamed: phoenix) is going well and working with SiteCore has proven to be a challenge in both the best and worst senses of the word.

Articles on the net seem to be a bit thin on the ground when it comes to some of the more advanced areas of the application and it is proving to be a bit of a struggle. While the API documentation is great, finding out what certain parameters mean and also how / if I can do things is proving to be difficult, often ending up with just going back to trial and error.

If anyone out there has any knowledge about the following, or can point me to some help that would be great:

Passing fields as parameters to renderings: is it possible? can you do it from within the content editor? I would like to have a rendering that allows the user to specify some values from fields in the template (like the background image to use) but not actually specify the value, just the field to grab.

Can I write Sitecore or ASP control references in XSLT templates and still have sitecore render them? This would be handy in some of the controls I am trying to build, otherwise I will have to build ASP controls and write a heap of logic behind them, rather than just parsing the XML.

So far I am pretty happy with SiteCore and I am enjoying trying to meld it into something that will be easy for the content managers to use, whilst still allowing a heap of flexibility in page layout and functionality. Baby steps.

Scooter whoopage

Yesterday I reamed myself on the scooter. I hit a patch of crap pavement at full speed and launched myself over the handle bars. I hit the ground pretty hard, but luckily my face was in the way to take most of the impact.

3 internal and 9 external stitches to my chin, and a potentially fractured hand and elbow later and I am back at work. I tried to power on through with my work on Quickflix's Project Phoenix yesterday but I had to head home for a lie down.

Today I get a couple of xrays to find out the damage to my right arm, and on Monday I head back to the docs for a check up.

Hasn't put me off riding though: I scooted to work and the doctors today, although riding was a little difficult with the busted up arm.

As for Phoenix: I should have the final style guide and touched up page layouts of the redesign ready for monday, although I have effectively lost a day and a half to the accident. The new site is, in my opinion, looking good and I can't wait to get cracking on the SiteCore implementation soon.

UPDATE: X-Rays are done, I've fractured my elbow and it has a haemarthrosis. Nice. Just waiting for the doc to get back to me on what to do from here.

Project Phoenix officially kicks off

The Quickflix office is alive with activity. Project Phoenix is now full steam ahead after a brief prep talk meeting this morning over coffee and muffins. While my portion of work has a name, we've still yet to come up with some decent project names for the other units. The remaining large portions of work to be named are the CRM implementation, the Allocation re-write, redevelopment of the financial systems, and redevelopment of our backoffice inventory tools (which we call "Director").

A little on Project Phoenix: At this point in time we've decided to use a third-party CMS application called SiteCore. We have quite a bit of experience with this CMS in house, however we've never done anything quite as big as Quickflix in it. We will be customising the actual CMS quite a bit to make it suit our needs, however it does save us writing alot of functions we would rather not have to deal with by providing them right out of the box (workflow, editors, pre-built tools, security etc). Right now I am in the process of setting up a virtual machine to use for development and training and it is a good learning exercise in setting up a SiteCore environment. The virtual machine will have Visual Studio 2005, SQL 2005, SiteCore 5.3 and the .net 2.0 framework all running on the Windows Server 2003 OS.

My goal by the end of this week is to be familiar with SiteCore enough to produce a prototype of the next Quickflix. Stay tuned for info if I can achieve this and any hurdles I come across.

New Quickflix Office & Project Phoenix

Today marks the end of our first week in the new Quickflix Office. We've finally settled in, I've got myself a bonsai tree and a wall to utilise and everything seems to be going pretty well.

The bonsai on my desk.

For those who aren't familiar with my job I am a senior developer and graphic designer at Quickflix, the biggest independant DVD rental company in Australia. I have been working for Quickflix since its inception, and have been involved with its development from prototype to full blown business.

As with most companies where their entire existance revolves around our technology we've reached a point where we've out grown our current IT offering. We're wanting to do things now to enhance our members experience that are just not feasible in our current environment.

Enter Project Phoenix. This project is about two things. Providing our subscribers with the best possible online DVD rental service through both efficient fulfilment and delivery and becoming the household name in home entertainment by having the best most engaging service available.

I am fortunate enough to be leading the redevelopment of our website from the ground up. In the next couple of months I will be blogging about our progress and you should see notes and info on the development of a new beautiful and dynamic interface, new exciting features and tools to make the Quickflix experience amazing, and ideas I will be using to help my team turn flashes of inspiration into full blown features.

I will be taking photos through the entire process and you can see these and more photos on my flickr page under the "Pix from the 'flix" set.

If you are a Quickflix member and have had some ideas about how you would like to make your Quickflix experience even better please don't hesitate to post a comment on any of posts I make. The more suggestions and ideas you provide the better we can make the service.

Please note: This blog is in no way affliated with Quickflix. I mearly work for them. As part of my contract and NDA, I will not be able to directly comment on new features and things that have not been yet released to public. I cannot comment on the inner workings of Quickflix so don't expect special insights that have not been made public to our users or the market.

EDIT: Fixed Typo