Count users online with Sitecore OMS

When you have a web application, you might want to know how many users are currently online. If you have visited some of web online forums you can see (usually on the first page) the number of currently online users.
This information might be also used to postpone some website jobs if there are too many users online, etc.
How do we know / count how many sessions or users are currently connected to our website in Sitecore?

Windows Live Writer Integration for Sitecore

Windows Live Writer is a great tool for blogging. It is simple, fast, and can be customized using plugins written in .NET. You can have web-based interface for adding your blog or articles, but integration with desktop client will not be superfluous as it provides a lot of benefits.
 In this post I'll show how to integrate it with Sitecore CMS using MetaWeblog API -  an application interface  that enables weblog entries to be written, edited, and deleted using web services.

Integration can be divided into two parts:

1. Implementing MetaWeblog API service members 
2. Creating and configuring various handlers that will tell Live Writer how to find and use our service

Using Coveo with Sitecore. Part 2: Performing a Query

This post is a part of the "Using Coveo with Sitecore" series.

• Indexing Sitecore items
• Performing a Query (this post)
• Tips and Tricks (snippets, hidden features and real-world examples)

There are many ways to retrieve data from Coveo, I'll describe most popular of them, their proc and cons.

Integrating search interface "as is"
Such integration of Coveo can be implemented in a day or even less, including configuring Sitecore Connector which will crawl only changed / newly created items, adding and configuring front-end search.

In order to add search interface to your website you need to:

Using Coveo with Sitecore. Part 1: Indexing Sitecore items

Coveo Search Platform provides a Sitecore package with a module called "Sitecore Connector", which allows you to crawl not just pages, but also content items without presentation, media library, etc. While Connector configuration is described rather well in this document, there are lot of major points that are not enough clear to the programmer who starts using it.

There are lot of things to do with Coveo, so I'll break the whole story into the different blog posts:

• Indexing Sitecore items - this post
• Performing a query (Coveo controls and custom Query Wrappers)
• Tips and Tricks (snippets, hidden features and real-world examples)

Let's begin from creating a Sitecore template that will contain different field types:

Expanding / collapsing Sitecore content tree nodes on double click

The Sitecore CMS provides very high level of usability, so people without special training can get used to it very quickly. But there is one thing in content tree, that behaves differently in a Windows Explorer. Let's see the following example:

If you double-click on the "Inner folder 1" folder name, it will expand / collapse. But how about Sitecore?

Hmm... double click does nothing, item simply gets refreshed.

Translating Sitecore items using Google Translate

One of the strongest techniques which can be used to increase sales and get more potential customers of the people from other regions is a multilingual website. Multi-language management is a cornerstone of Sitecore CMS, integrated into all aspects of content and site management. It allows you to build a multi-language website with almost the same effort as a single-language. See this amazing case-study about building website in 28 languages.

But what if you want to translate an existing site with a thousands of pages, hundreds of templates and website sections? How to identify possible architecture(like "Shared" fields that actually should be translated) problems, or implementation bugs (hard-coded texts, displaying item name instead of a title and so on). Sure, you can ask content-editors to spend few weeks in order to translate the site, test it, etc. But how about instant website translation using some online service? Translation quality is not as important when you simply need to identify possible problems after translation, so... let's start!

In this example, I'll use Google Translate as a translation provider. I also tried Bing Translator service, it's almost identical, but does not provide easy API like google-api-for-dotnet.

Using Sitecore media cache with custom handlers.

Every certified Sitecore developer knows how media files caching works. When you request image from the media library, you can specify custom parameters like image height, width, scaling, etc. For each parameters set Sitecore stores generated image in the "/App_Data/MediaCache/" folder.

For example, you have a following image in you media library:

/~/media/images/f1