Nathan J Pledger - All Comments

re: Sitecore: Accessing Hierarchical Node structures from SQL

Nathan Pledger — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:33:32 GMT

Hi again Alex,

100% agree that Sitecore should not support this tactic - I would advise against it in usual circumstances.

The reason why we're using Sitecore to drive the extraction of sales/interest is due to the site hierarchy. As far as the user is concerned, the fact that they are in Bikes means that anything underneath is of interest to them. This cracks the one aspect of relevance. We have a number of web sites, with similar products, but structured according to the client/sales outlet, so Sitecore is the logical place to look for product hierarchy in the context of that site. eg. Bikes > MotoGp > James Toseland may be in Motorsport > Bikes > Manx Heros in another site.

We then use external systems (sales data, tagging of products, User-generated-content and user browsing history) to drive the impportance of products beneath the Bikes node and decide whether it should appear as a product of interest, ie. in the "top 10" based on the selected algorithm.

We do have a "Tagging" concept that will ultimately drive positioning of products within Sitecore, but we still feel the structure of Sitecore is the best way to identify relationships between product topics. I guess we could mirror the Sitecore node structure in a separate system, but this feels clunky.

Also, we see any minor revisions to v5 with v6 well on the roadmap is unlikely to pose breaking changes that we can't work around. And we would *never* write to the database!

Thanks for reading/commenting.

re: Sitecore: Accessing Hierarchical Node structures from SQL

Alex de Groot — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:15:43 GMT

Hello Nathan,

Please be aware that querying against the database directly is unsupported. We're quite unique in the world to say so, but this approach is highly unmaintainable.

Beside of that, the most searched/bought/used products... that's all about conversion. By default conversion results are not saved in Sitecore but in an external system. Can't you use this system to retrieve the data?

Kind regards,

Alex de Groot

Sitecore Solution Architect

re: Sitecore: Overriding the style of the fields in the Content Editor

Nathan Pledger — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:26:02 GMT

Thanks for commenting.

That's the idea. Select from the left, remove from the right - although the first user who used it didn't figure it on their own out so some usability issues to be ironed out.

These tags are an idea I came up with that allows an e-Commerce true 360-degree content management and reporting. Say "Big Brother" is tagged with "Reality TV", "Davina Mcall", content publishers can automatically target products into certain sections of the site, users and the site can then use these to cross-sell against interest, generate reports and mount targetted eMarketing campaigns.

The Tag Cloud itself is actually a "v1" control. What I intended to do originally was create a Sitecore Custom Field Type, but due to deadlines I couldn't work round the [ridiculous] issue where you can't create server-side web controls within the Sitecore editor. The Tags are retrieved "across the wire" from a remote site, so further improvements will be made including a more AJAX feel - maybe show a loading gauge for larger clouds.

re: Sitecore: Overriding the style of the fields in the Content Editor

Lars Nielsen — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:28:41 GMT

Well, sometimes the most obvious solutions is right in front of you.

What interest me here is the cool tagcloud control you have created. I like the idea on how to quickly configure your tag cloud by visually automatically gettiung your proposed tags, then reusing the cloud to remove tags that may not fit exactly to the contents of the article (I assume this is what the purpose is?)

re: My First Silverlight App - Lessons Learnt

Robin Paardekam — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:38:25 GMT

Good to read that other developers have similar experiences with Silverlight as I did. Specially the confusion regarding "what should be done where" sounds familiar. Thanks for the tips as well.

If you'd rather use VS2008 to create Silverlight Projects, you could install the Silverlight SDK (I used the 2.0 Beta1 release) and the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual STudio 2008. It will add some Silverlight options to your VS2008 installation, like project-templates and my code-editor in split-screen-mode works just fine for my Silverlight objects. I can edit my XAML and see the changes being applied "realtime". Hope this helps. Regards, Robin.

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re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Dennis van der Stelt — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:52:15 GMT

Yeah, somewhere in your settings. My comments are always emailed to me.

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Nathan Pledger — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:49:30 GMT

Oh thanks, Dennis!

Sorry about your comment going, Mischa. I don't have anything in my admin area, I'm afraid.

Is there anyway I can get my comments to be emailed to me, then I won't miss anything?

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Dennis van der Stelt — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 06:49:18 GMT

There's one comment that I've restored now, by Petr Palas (Kentico). No Mischa comment though. It wasn't in the database.

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Mischa Kroon — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:12:26 GMT

Ahh so that's where my comment went.

You did check your comments review admin part I take it ?

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Dennis van der Stelt — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:18:41 GMT

Nathan, I'm doing a training right now. Last week was the DNS transfer to the new server ip address. The comment is probably on the old server, not here, because DNS take 24 hours to update.

I'll have a look if I can find anything on the old server that's gone here and see if I can post it.

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Nathan Pledger — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:56:27 GMT

Interesting to see that within hours, Sitecore, then Kentico (sorry, I have no idea where they're comments went - thanks Community Server) and Umbraco have replied regarding thier packages.

In my response, I do wish Sitecore was a viable solution for me, both interms of licensing and viability of installation on a shared platform. For .NET enthusiasts, I recommend downloading Sitecore Xpress, it is true genius in a ball of XML, XSL and XAML. Checkout Alex's blog, too.

I am going to try Umbraco again. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a try. It sounds impressive, though is a bit downspec-ced.

Though I am still going to write my own, which is going really well, thanks!

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Petr Palas, Kentico — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:58:00 GMT

Hi Nathan,

I'm sorry to hear that you had problems with using our software, Kentico CMS. Did you try to contact our support (support@kentico.com)? They will be happy to help you.

As with any other software, there's always some learning curve, so it's possible that a simple advice may have helped you. Kentico CMS is used by customers in 60 countries right now, so I believe it may work for you, too.

Best Regards,

Petr Palas, Kentico Software

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Hartvig — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:53:25 GMT

Warning - very long comment. Disclaimer: I'm the founder of the umbraco project ;-)

There's never one system to rule them all - that's why there are so many cms's out there.

> I played with it for a while, but was not pleased

> with the output of XHTML and open-source worries me.

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by the "not pleased with the output of XHTML"? umbraco is second-to-none when it comes to a cms leaving your markup intact and making it easy to produce valid xhtml strict sites - like our own :)

It's very easy to customize the looks of umbraco, like replacing the section icons in the lower left corner (it's just image files). However a lot of people like the anonymous design of the application, which doesn't takes focus away from what's essential - the content of your site.

Regarding the worries of open source, umbraco is a commercial open source project under the MIT license. The MIT license means no string attached (unlike the GPL and other copy-left licenses where there's a risk that using such a product means extra obligations for your work thats based on the product).

Being a commercial open source product, it means that you can get support, that there's people working full time on the platform, etc. The only difference is that at least for web cms, a paradigm shift has come where it's actually so (relatively) cheap to develop software that using the open source model for distribution is profitable (for us at least).

There's a ton of myths when it comes to open source one of them is that open source is free and also that people tend to compare them with "traditional software packages" - both there *are* big differences on both sides. A traditional product often consist of a box, documentation, manuals, a cd-rom (dvd) - and indirectly printed brochures, ads, sales meetings, etc. On the open source side, the only thing you get for free is the "bits" which most of the cases are downloaded.

This has two perspectives, from the open source side it's very interesting that you can get a product distributed with a close-to-zero marketing/sales budget. The sales cost of a traditional product is at least 50 percent of the retail price, often much more. Another thing that often add to the price of a closed source product is the lifetime cycle of the product. By this I mean that the expenses of maintaining/selling a closed source product doesn't stop once the product is sold. Often you have customer services and support which also add costs which is a part of the retail price.

With an open source product the marketing costs are close-to-zero, the distribution costs close-to-zero and the lifetime cycle costs zero. This means that the costs of developing and maintaining an open source product is the development and management costs alone, and in software that's often the lowest part of a budget for a software development company.

If umbraco users needs the usual gains from a closed source product like support and training, we offer that. But you only pay for the services you need. In my opinion it's the best of both worlds (however, I'm not saying that it'll work with any type of software product, but for us it was a match made in heaven).

Being an open source project also means involvement and this is where many oss projects suffer from bad or no management at all. Many projects gets bloated because developers love to add features, but care much less to maintain, design and polish existing ones. And often there's no real vision for the project. Many closed source projects suffer from the same, but they die. The get out of business. That doesn't happen to the open source projects as that type usually just attracts more and more hobby programmers who're pleased that no one questions that yet-another-useless-feature gets added. Building great software takes great management and the courage to say no and the ability to listen and focus on what matters for the people who uses your product. And that's no matter whether it's closed or open source.

But if you have great management AND a great community you can get a lot of advantages from not being a silo project where all discussions and development are kept secret within company walls. You can turn your users into participants and gain from a massive collective intelligence. When it works, it's phenomenal and way beyond what's possible being closed (not just in source but also in mindset).

At the same time, an open source company have the advantages of a *very* viral distribution form if your product fits the market. We grew 991% last year and 350% the year before that. With a close-to-zero marketing budget. That's not only insane, but absolutely impossible without an extremely viral model.

Having a large distribution (umbraco has grown from 1.500 installations to almost 50.000 in two years) means that you get a big install base where you can offer smaller and cheaper products. You'll need to think different but it does indeed pays of.

As I said - for many types of software a paradigm shift is happening and open source is not different. It's not magic, not voodoo. It still takes great management and a piece of software doesn't get better just because it has a 0$ price tag. Crap is still crap no matter how cheap it is. But if you combine the best from both worlds you get something that's very powerful - and profitable.

Feel free to contact me at nh (a) umbraco [.] dk if you get further questions :-)

Cheers,

Niels / umbraco

re: Still no viable Content Management solutions?

Alex de Groot — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:42:57 GMT

Cool, thanks a lot for the feedback on the systems. We're aware of the issues with Sitecore Xpress when it comes to databases.

We didn't got the possibility to change our original product for the Xpress release, and actually we don't want too. The system should be directly derived from our Trunk.

I'm currently investigating the possibilities to create 1 SQL Server database out of it using Schemes, but I'm not sure this will work out.

But I'm very glad you took the time evoluate. Please feel free to contact us using our Forums on SDN(http://sdn.sitecore.net) or contact a local office.

We'll collect them and make sure they will be fixed in the upcoming release.

Kind regards,

Alex de Groot

Solution Architect

Sitecore International