Sitecore Reports as a Service

The project I'm blogging about today was started more than 6 months ago as a self-education sandbox for learning ASP.net MVC and a few other modern frameworks and tools.
It's not that large actually, but since I was rather busy and able to spend about one hour per week on it - it took so long to be released.

The idea is pretty simple: I want my Sitecore website reports to be available on the web to my iPad, iPhone or Android, in both visual and table format. Also, I don't want to install anything on my website and maintain it later. Ideally, I want to enter my credentials somewhere, and see the reports for all my websites immediately.

Let's review these crazy requirements one by one and create implementation plan:

Sitecore Courier - Effortless Packaging

The first question many Sitecore developers ask when they start thinking about deploying changes with Sitecore is – “How to track item changes?” The deal is - you cannot simply deploy the updated site from version control system (VCS), because production site also holds content items, being constantly edited by content editors, and you need to merge it.

Language Fallback and Sitecore Dictionary

Sitecore CMS Dictionary is the best place to keep all texts that can be used across the site: "read more", "click here", etc. . It's internal architecture is a little unusual - it stores key/value pairs in the temp file  /{yourSiteRoot}/temp/dictionary.dat, which is updated during item:saved event(via the handler in web.config).

WURFL-based mobile device detection for Sitecore CMS

Mobile web browsing is so popular nowadays, that I was confused by the fact that there is no plug'n'play mobile detection solution for Sitecore and many people still use odd code like "if(userAgent.Contains('iPhone')...".
The best mobile device database is WURFL, and it has a great .NET API from 51 Degrees... so what are we waiting for? Let's create a new module!

Persona Changer update - testing any personalization rules in a few clicks!

Some time ago, we've got amazing Shared Source module called “Persona Changer” from Steve Green. Testing personalized websites became much easier in a very user-friendly way.

Live visitor tracking with Sitecore OMS and Bing Maps

Real-time information delivery is the one of the most important elements of our online experience. When information being available at the moment it's produced, you can act really quickly and efficiently. That is why the words "live", "instant", "real-time" are so popular in modern web applications.
There are lot of fun apps that show people's tweets, photo galleries on the map, but how about getting similar(and useful) app for your own website?
If it's build on Sitecore, it's incredibly easy. You just need to create a UI and a service that will retrieve your data.

In this post I'll show how to create application that will show Web Forms submissions on your website using Bing Maps.