We recently worked with a client to create a series of smaller sites that were composed of the same templates and components being developed for their main flagship site. These microsites needed to conform to a common layout but required the ability to have unique branding in the header as well as unique hostnames or domain names. Setting up a new site in Sitecore is a fairly straightforward process, typically – you create the new home node in the content tree then add a declaration to the web.config. In this particular scenario however, the client did not want to have to make a configuration update to deploy each new microsite – they simply wanted to create the content for it, publish it, and have it available to their audiences immediately.
I have gone through a link (https://www.sitecore.net/learn/blogs/technical-blogs/chris-sulham/posts/2015/01/quick-guide.aspx) but found incomplete information.
The general approach to solve this requirement is to store the site definition data in the Sitecore database as a 'site definition' of some kind. You will then need a processor that will initialize the sites list after the file configs have been read and update site definitions or add to the list.
#jammykam pointed to the Dynamic Sites Manager as an example of this, so you may want to start there.
Since authors typically define these new sites after Sitecore start-up, you also will need some functionality (usually a ribbon button or publishing event handler) that will let you trigger an update of the current site list in application memory with the latest data.
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I am trying to rebuild our website in Django, and I am currently facing a series of rather difficult challenges for which I am not prepared. I was hoping to get some help in the matter.
The website I am building is an online archival platform for artists called Lekha. The core of Lekha is the dashboard page (which you can check out on this link, just sign in with the email stacko#test.com and the password test if you have the patience).
On the dashboard page, users have access to a hierarchical filesystem that we would like to function like a desktop filesystem for ease of use. Users can use the filesystem to organize their 'artworks' into folders. These artworks themselves are a collection of media, along with the metadata of the artwork. To upload this media and fill in the metadata, users will use a form. If users want to edit an artwork's metadata, they can do so through an auto-populated form on the same page.
The issue that I am facing is that I am struggling to find an elegant way to make all of this happen without reloading the page. Users need to be able to add, delete, and rename folders in the filesystem without reloading the page (just like dropbox). They also need to be able to add 'artwork' database entries using a popup form, and edit 'artworks' they have created through an auto-populated form that is also served to them without reloading the page (as it is currently implemented on our existing dashboard page).
All of the Django tutorials I have seen delete items using a dedicated /delete/ page, but this would require reloading the page. Based on my research, the solution I am looking for has to do with asynchronous updating through AJAX.
I wanted to ask all the Django experts out there what the best way to go about this would be. Are there any best practices I should know about before going into this? We are building our website to be robust and scale well.
Are there any specific libraries for asynchronous stuff in Django that are best?
How do asynchronous websites scale if we have several users on them at the same time, and should I write the backend in any specific way to account for potential scaling issues?
What is the difference between ASGI and WSGI?
Are there tools that I can use such as htmx to make my life easier?
I am creating a forum using Gatsby
I have develop a form that users can use to create threads to add to the forum in a page called create.js which which sends the data to an external DB.
Once, the user has submitted the thread, I want to create a new page using a template, normally I would use in Gatsby-node.js; according to the Gatsby Docs Gatsby-node.js is only run once on deployment.
Is there another way that I can access CreatePage() outside of Gatsby-node.js or is there another function I am missing?
Ultimately I want the new page to available in the Gatsby application, without redeploying, after the user has created the necessary content.
The way Gatsby works is that all pages need to be generated at build time. You cannot add new pages without triggering a new build.
Gatsby is not a suitable platform for a forum since content changes hundreds or thousands of times a day. Gatsby is intended for content that changes infrequently such as blogs (which might update a few times a day).
I order to generate pages without using CreatePage in Gatsby-node.js, Gatsby advises to use #reach/Router and matchPage to extend the client application's router, we call this functionality (Client-only Routes)
more info here
I'm building a backend with some core-functionality app (which means, of course, a single DB for the app).
I'm looking for elegant way to create app for every new customer by "copying" some template (basic) app to be able modify every's customer app with specific customer's requirements.
For ex., I have some basic StoreApp in Django. It could have some basic features, models etc. Now, when some new customer wants to sign up, I want dynamically (not manually) create additional copy of the existing StoreApp (of course, under different name and its own DB), make initial migration for it, register it in the settings and so on. Lately, I want to customize this new app according to the customer's requirements. I'm just looking for a way to separate code maintenance for every existing app, but, as I mentioned before, not to create every app manually.
Any elegant way to do it? Some existing plugin for Django?
Thanks in advance,
Efi
I am using Sitecore 8, Update 3.
I am attempting to bulk create a couple thousand items that use a custom template. All of these items are created under one specific parent item.
The custom template has two fields which are Path [Single-Line Text] and Target [General Link].
The source of the data is in an old SQL database.
Is there a way to do this?
The Sitecore marketplace module Data Importer is a option for you.
Create a custom importer with the sitecore api is also possible, to speed up, you can disable the index rebuild.
Since your data is already in SQL Serve, you should take a look at using the SSIS Components for Sitecore, it was designed for importing exactly this kind of data in bulk into Sitecore using ETL.
You can find more info in the blog post Creating your first project with SSIS Components for Sitecore and there is also some good additional into in the Migrating to Sitecore: Going from WordPress to Sitecore with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) post.
The Integration Services Components for Sitecore is available on the Sitecore Marketplace, and it is compatible with Sitecore XP8.
I'll also add, if you are creating anything more than 100 items below a single parent item then this is not recommended Sitecore practice unless the items sit within an Item Bucket. Make sure you account for this, or split your items up into smaller sub-folders (e.g. year/month folders for news article type items)
In these scenarios you normally end up writing code to call the api and create the items programmatically rather than doing a generic import.
If you need to create a large amount of items I would recommend writing a console app to do this. You could use the Sitecore Item Web api to create items outside of the Sitecore context or investigate the new Entity Service api in Sitecore, both will be capable of creating large amounts of Sitecore items.
http://mikerobbins.co.uk/2015/01/06/entityservice-sitecore-service-client/
https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sdn5/modules/sitecore%20item%20web%20api/sitecore_item_web_api_developer_guide_sc65-66-usletter.pdf
If these don't float your boat you could always write async code to create the Sitecore items and have that executed by an aspx page in a Sitecore instance - works well for one off tasks.
Example of Asynchronous page processing in ASP.net webforms (.NET 2.0)
I'm new to Django and I come from Drupal family. There we have Organic Groups with which we can create groups of content and subsites; how do I do something like that with Django?
Say I'm making this site for my company using Django and every department in my company needs a private section on the site. For example, the design people have their own part of the website into which the back-end developers can not come in. And the back-end developers will have the same thing too.
I want to build the site in such a way that I just login into Django admin and add a new category or subsite or group (whatever the Django term is) with the same settings from other groups or with similar settings.
It depends on what you mean by "private section". You should probably try looking at it from a different angle:
Django splits a site's functionality by means of "apps". Each app does its specific thing, and gets a set of tables in the database. Apps can access each others' tables. For example, it's common for other apps to access the Auth app's user, group, and permissions tables. Is this what you mean by "sub sites"?
As for access control, users can be assigned to groups and they can have various administrative permissions assigned to them. Add, change, and delete permissions are automatically generated for each model (i.e. database table). You can also add your own permissions.
I don't think you'll be able to separate the designers from the back-end developers at the Django level. You'll need to do something else, such as maintain separate source repositories for each and merge them to create the usable site (each group would have read-only access to the other). It really depends on your teams' discipline, because these elements can get intertwined.
Django recommends that static files be served by something else, say directly from your web server, or from another machine with a simple HTTP server (no CGI/WSGI/whatever). This is because Django can only slow down static files compared to direct service. However, for testing, ther is a static page server you can enable.
Given all that, static files usually amount to CSS, images, media, and JavaScript. Of these, the back-end people might want to mess with the JS, but that's it, so this could be in the designers' repo.
The Django tree itself has the code for the site and the apps. It's almost all back end stuff. The exception is the HTML template files, located in the "templates" directory in each app. These are the files that are filled in with the context data supplied by the back-end view code. I have no idea if this is front or back end for you guys; it could be mostly back end if there's a lot of CSS discipline, but I think that's unlikely.
There are a lot of things that you can do in Django that make life easier for one side or the other. For example, template tags allow custom Python code to generate HTML to insert into the page. I use these to generate tab bars and panes, for example.
I really can't help much more without getting a better picture of what your needs are. The question is still vague. You're probably best off taking a day or two going through the tutorial, seeing what the Django perspective is, and then working out how (or if!) it fits into your needs.