What this book covers

Chapter 1, Basic Presentation Components, focuses on creating information architecture and presenting it using out-of-the-box components and different Model-View-Controller (MVC) renderings. It also shows how effectively you can utilize out-of-the-box components to provide greater ease and flexibility for future enhancements.

Chapter 2, Extending Presentation Components, gives examples for extending out-of-the-box components to develop multilingual and multidevice websites, integrate the content with external systems, and provide easier content management for content owners.

Chapter 3, Customizing the User Interface Framework, demonstrates you how to create new interfaces or extend existing interfaces, using different framework components. It also provides some recipes to please content authors.

Chapter 4, Leveraging the Sitecore Backend, gets you completely involved in Sitecore backend architecture. This chapter gives you a brief tour of different the features to extend the core engine using pipelines, processors, events, handlers, hooks, jobs, schedulers, and so on.

Chapter 5, Making Content Management More Efficient, shows you different tricks and techniques to manage the content in a better way and provide better usability with the use of backend and frontend frameworks and different functionalities such as dictionary, validations, rule engine, Rich Text Editor, Item Web API, and so on.

Chapter 6, Working with Media, explores different techniques while working with Sitecore media items such as securing them, serving them through content delivery network (CDN), and utilizing them for responsive web designs.

Chapter 7, Workflow and Publishing, shows how you can extend the workflow and publishing architecture to achieve scheduled publishing and unpublishing, using web deploy while publishing and customizing pipeline and events.

Chapter 8, Security, explains how to create different user profiles and give custom permissions to it. It also explains how to achieve single sign-on (SSO) securely and allow extranet access in a secure way.

Chapter 9, Sitecore Search, describes different techniques for accessing data from indexing. It explains how to implement different search techniques, which modern search engines use such as tagging, autosuggest, boosting search results, finding more like this, and did you mean.

Chapter 10, Experience Personalization and Analytics Using xDB, explains how to provide the best user experience using different techniques of real-time personalization, it is the heart of marketing programs. It also briefs features for engaging users. This chapter will also provide good recipes to use and extend Experience Database (xDB) and generate different analytics reports.

Chapter 11, Securing, Scaling, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting, focuses on different techniques for making the Sitecore environment more secure. It also explains techniques to troubleshoot slowness, create clustered environments to get better performance, high availability, and scalability. It also briefs some techniques to troubleshoot.

Appendix A, Getting Started with Sitecore, contains information to help you in Sitecore installation, and create a project for your Sitecore solution using Microsoft Visual Studio.

Appendix B, Tools and Resources for Sitecore Developers, provides information on tools and resources available for Sitecore developers to install, and maximize their productivity and expertise by using it.