Thursday, April 18, 2013

Sitecore 7, not just for developers!


Sitecore 7 is buzzing!
While unsure about the release data, MVP's around the world are taking the deep dive.
So am I, diving in the new Sitecore version, that Sitecore call a "developer release".

Developer release? No, it's also a content editor release!
Is this release really a developer release?
I don't think so, and this is the reason: While there certainly a lot of developing improvements,
the improvements for the average content editor are far bigger than for example Sitecore 6.5 or 6.6, which had DMS as the most important additions.
What improvements are there for the content editor? Buckets!

Buckets provide many search enhancements!
The integration of buckets is by far the biggest change for content manager. It provides a big step in back-end search functionality.
Buckets started as a marketplace module called "Sitecore Item Buckets" (here) and is the biggest new feature of Sitecore 7.
Buckets provide new searching capabilities with a great user interface (facets, f.e.). Also is allows the content editor to perform operations on all items in a search result.
These functions are called Search Operations (I blogged about these here implementing-search-operations-in-sitecore-7).



1. one search box
2. results can be shown in different ways, this can be altered
3. blazing fast, is said "search has returned 8737 results in 00.0753 seconds "
4. each results has actions you can perform on it
5. facets to narrow down the search

The search box features a dropdrown with additional functions:




1. a list of recent searches for easy access
2. navigate to recently modified content items
3. navigate to recently created content items
4. navigate to recently opened search tabs
5. some predefined search filters, developers can add new ones here
6. search operations, enables performing actions on items in the current search results!

Datasource improvements
The fact that datasource of a layout are stored as id's also provide content editors and page designers with great benefits!
Currently, content bound to a component in the pagedesigner, is lost when this contentitem is moved or renamed. When it's deleted, no warning is shown about the fact it is used as a datasource item.
NO More!!
Due to the fact datasources are stored as id's, links are tracked and moving an item, doesn't mean the connection is lost!

New field types
How many time have you used multilink fields to store related content (if not done by tagging)?
Often these are used for lists of links next to an article, called "also interesting", "more on this subject" or "related articles".
These always required manual updating when new (related) articles were added.
Now, with new field types, these collections of related content can be based on a search query, thus relieving the content editor of keeping the links up to date manually!!

All in all great stuff, not only for developers, but maybe even more so for content editors, hooray!


2 comments:

  1. Where can I get Sitecore 7 developer release? I looking for the bin in SDN site. But I cannot found.

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    Replies
    1. Sitecore 7 is available for MVP's on sdn.sitecore.net

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