Sitecore CMS We study in Russian. Introduction

Good afternoon, colleagues. I want to open on Habré a series of articles on Sitecore CMS. Immediately make a reservation, I am not an employee of this company, I have been successfully creating various solutions for more than 4 years using this CMS, mainly for Danish clients. It is an honor for me to be the pioneer of this series in Habré. So, the first article will be about what a Sitecore CMS is and a brief description of the possibilities, and I will also answer the questions for which tasks and which companies this product is suitable.
It is worth mentioning here that Sitecore, as a company, actually produces several products besides CMS, including Sitecore Intranet Portal (SIP) - Intranet Scripting Solution, Sitecore Foundry, a product for multisite solutions, and several modules and integrations for e-commerce, management systems, e-mail campaigns, web forms (Web Forms for Marketers). A complete list of Sitecore products can be found here: http://www.sitecore.net/Products.aspx
One of the most interesting additions, perhaps, is that the CMS also includes a product for web analytics - DMS (digital marketing system), and it integrates with the CMS in one package called CEP (customer engagement platform): http: // www.sitecore.net/Products/Customer-Engagement-Platform.aspx
Thus, Sitecore offers a full range of tools for conducting modern and effective e-marketing. But for this series of posts, I will limit myself to one product, or rather, the platform on which this is all built, Sitecore CMS.

What is a CMS?

Content management software (CMS) is software that helps non-technical experts manage the content of web applications without understanding the technical details. Sitecore CMS
uses the ASP.NET platform and works under the control of IIS, which opens up a huge number of opportunities for technicians to develop practically any web applications.
Now there are many different CMS solutions. Both paid and free, Sitecore CMS belongs to the 1st type, and is mainly aimed at working with large customers, although both the developers and end users have a free version ( http://xpress.sitecore.net/ ), which can use both for exploring the platform and blogging.
In the corporate market, the main competitors are such major players as SDL, Adobe, Ektron, and several more. This can be judged by the schedule from the report of the company Gartner , where Sitecore is positioned as a leader.

A full report with a detailed description can be found here:
www.sitecore.net/Resources/whitepapers/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant.aspx
If you look at the company's customers, then you can see international companies, such as Toshiba, Siemens, KIA, Mazda, Canon, Nestle, Microsoft, and Danish government websites. You can find the full list here: www.sitecore.net/Customers.aspx .
As you can see, the customer portfolio is quite wide. I think the number and size of customers speaks for itself.

Introduction to Sitecore CMS

Sitecore CMS is a high-performance, scalable, extensible ASP.NET CMS, non-limiting in technologies for generating custom markup. You can use all currently available technologies, such as XHTML, HTML5, CSS, jQuery, JSON, XML, etc.
Short list of features:

• Flexible, hierarchical data storage (you can use SQL Server or Oracle).
• Simple and straightforward for API technicians
• Ability to configure and expand by expanding the provided pipelines, event handling, etc.
• An engine that dynamically collects and caches management components, which helps create solutions with code reuse.
• Device management concept — allows you to create different display pages for different clients (browser, PDF, printer, XML feed) or for mobile devices.
• Security, including authentication, authorization, roles and management profiles is implemented using ASP.NET Membership Services.
• Ensuring the workflow (workflow) and separation of content into published and unpublished.
• A visual comparison of the differences between the content (content) versions, including individual fields.
• Media Library for storing any type of unstructured data and files.
• Tight integration with Visual Studio 2010 IDE ( Sitecore Rocks

First start

Just add / sitecore / login to your website address, for example:
localhost / sitecore / login and you will be taken to the login page, (Default login: admin password: b)

where several login options will be available. I recommend using the Desktop mod right away, it will provide you with more features, like a banal opening of several windows, and expanded access to various settings and utilities which will be discussed below:

Some built-in utilities of Sitecore CMS:

• Content Editor - the main tool for editing content
• Developer Center - browser-based IDE for editing presentation components
• Template Manager - an environment for managing templates, which are essentially data types.
• Control Panel - system management and personal settings.
• Media Library - multimedia library editor, where they store any files, such as images and video
• Security Editor - managing access rights to items for users and roles
• Preview - viewing content, with the possibility of how it is viewing versions at a point in time in the past and in the future
• Debugger - activate the built-in debugger for analyzing pages, including their performance
• Workbox - workflow management
• Access Viewer- view effective security settings
• Role Manager - security role management
• User Manager - CMS user management and the ability to identify visitors to published sites
• Package Designer - creating packages for migrating content and files from one environment to another.
• Installation Wizard - Installer for packages created in Package Designer
• File Explorer - shows the physical paths to documents
• Log Viewer - view event log
• Broken Links - Manage broken links to objects.

As you can see, there are a lot of standard utilities, and some I do not use in my personal experience. For example, it is much more convenient to open log files directly from disk than to use the Log Viewer, although this application is useful if you do not have direct access to the disk, for example, on a remote server.
I would also like to note that the developer is also allowed to embed his applications for the system depending on the needs of the client / customer, as well as to expand existing ones. Most applications are built on XAML technology, which makes it possible to modify any aspects of embedded applications quite easily. Let's talk about this in one of the following articles.

Developer Resources

A very powerful network has been created for Sitecore CMS developers, which is available at sdn.sitecore.net, as well as organized 24-hour support for licensed customers. There are a large number of professionals on the web who run their interesting blogs on Sitecore development in English. Here is the rss feed containing all the blogs:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ZsFOz4a62xG9Py3Idbq02Q&_render=rss
In addition to the official forum, many use StackOverflow:
stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sitecore
Another useful resource is a library of free shared source modules (more than 100):
http://trac.sitecore.net/Index
With the SVN client, you can download the code for any module!
In addition to these resources, Sitecore provides training for developers and users at various levels:
http://www.sitecore.net/Support/Training.aspx

findings

As you can see, Sitecore is a very large and powerful player in the CMS (WCMS) market, providing tremendous opportunities for both end users and developers. I recommend that you pay attention to this product and read my further more technical notes on the intricacies and nuances of development for Sitecore CMS.
PS
This and the following posts are designed for developers who are interested in corporate content management systems, Sitecore CMS in particular, and who want to learn about the internal structure and specifics of this CMS. I hope you find this information useful for your professional purposes, as the development market for Sitecore CMS is growing by leaps and bounds, and knowledge of this technology can help you get an interesting project, for example. Well, if not, then at least expand the range of your knowledge and skills.
Write, ask questions in a personal, and in the comments. I will be glad to hear.