In 2014 I wanted to start a tech blog about my Sitecore journey. I was looking for a blogging platform which is “by developers for developers”. I didn’t want a rich editor where I had to format everything with a toolbar and a mouse click. I just wanted to prepare my blog posts in notepad (or similar) and copy them to the backend of the platform, in markdown. After some research I found Ghost, an open source blogging platform written in Node.js. The first public version of Ghost was released in…

The past years I fully focused on backend development. In my current job as a Full Stack Software Engineer I’m more and more interested in frontend development as well. I was very excited to attend my first frontend conference last month, the Uphill Conf on top of the beautiful Mount Gurten in Bern. It was a fantastic day. The line up was superb and the organizers did a very good job. Thank you a lot! I don’t want to say too much about the conference. I just want to share my two favorite talks…

In a current project we are using Solr for the first time. We ran into several problems which all of you may had. Most of them are well documented and a solution is easy to find. This blog post describes an issue with non UTC dates which was not that easy to find. My use case was to build a news application where each item has a field . The date is stored in Solr as follow (in UTC): Now when I want to query all news that are older than first of January 2016, I first need to get the date…

One missing feature in Sitecore is the ability to limit the number of components which can be binded to a placeholder. By default, an author can add as many components to a placeholder as he wants. But sometimes there are restrictions in the layout, where more than a specific number of components would break it. Let’s say we have a teaser row to add components. In a three-column layout, the maximum of allowed teasers would be three. There are already good solutions available for this (e.g. this…

Habitat is an example architecture from Sitecore. With this modular architecture, everything is encapsulated and separated into modules, where each module is a Visual Studio project. A great introduction to Habitat can be found in this blog post by Anders Laub. Encapsulation also means, that a module doesn’t know other modules. When using dependency injection, you need to configure all dependencies somewhere. And this place needs to know every implementation, which is not possible with Habitat…