Disclaimer: This post was in a draft state for many, many, months. It was started and subsequently turned into my Sitecore Symposium 2012 talk. Now that SitecoreSym is over I am making this post and the associated code available.

Did you know that you can access special properties of a Sitecore item the same way you get a typical field's value?

When trying to determine if a Sitecore field has a value there are two basic ways.

Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["fieldName"].HasValue

or

Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["fieldName"].Value != ""

There are many ways to get the value of a Sitecore field and each is slightly different.

I had discovered a little bug revolving around the Sitecore.Data.Fields.Field.ContainsStandardValue property in Sitecore (at least 6.4.1.101221 through current). You cannot trust the value returned by Field.ContainsStandardValue if you have made any of the following calls:

A common practice in all of my Sitecore sites is to have some sort of content fallback. What this means is that a field's value can come from somewhere other than the field itself, the source item (if it is a clone), or its standard values.

Content fallback is an excellent way to increase editor productivity and reduce content redundancy! Here are the three most common scenarios I run into with every project.

One of the major pain points when deploying Sitecore based web sites has always been configuration management. Sitecore has thousands of lines of configuration scattered across more than a dozen files.

Have you ever had a TreeList field in Sitecore only to see this when editing an item?

We, at Hedgehog Development, have been intimately working with Sitecore serialization since it was released with Sitecore 6.0 in 2008. Specifically our interest has been in helping developers bring their Sitecore items into Visual Studio and essentially allow you to treat your Sitecore items as code. We do this with our Team Development for Sitecore product.

I was having a discussion the other day and was asked to elaborate on the serialization format that Sitecore uses. I figured I would have some notes, or official documentation, on the format, but I couldn't find any! I figured this is a good a place as any to describe the serialization format that Sitecore uses.

I was having some fun with the Sitecore (6.5.0.110818) rules engine over the last couple days. Specifically, I was trying to show content editor warnings as well as control icons for templates based on the name of the item. However the Item name comparison, when using a regular expression, was never evaluating to true.