Built on Sitecore Xpress

As from today, this blog runs on Sitecore Xpress. I have spent the day setting it up.

So, what is Sitecore Xpress ? Sitecore Xpress is a personal edition of the professional Sitecore CMS product, which just recently was released and made free of charge for developers. This is really cool, since Sitecore is a very good, mature and professional CMS, that has loads of features and is built on .NET. It also has a lot of extension points, which makes it a realy nice development platform for large enterprise websites. The free Xpress edition has almost all the features of the full product, though it is restricred to one user and can only be used for personal, non-commercial sites (details here).

Since we use Sitecore a lot at work, and it is so developer-friendly, the decition to use Sitecore Xpress for my personal website, was really easy to make. It will make a good platform for the various features I would like to add to my web site in the feature.

A nice example on how easy use and setup Sitecore is, that although there are no built-in blogging application in Sitecore, it took me just a day to setup the entire website, including the blog and migration of content from the old platform. The blog is actually a tree of so-called Sitecore content Items. Items is the cornerstone of Sitecore. Using a few XSLT renderings, the blog page, archives and individual posts and comments can be displayed. No additional code was written to achieve this. The only code I have written for this website so far, is a small User Control ( < 30 lines of code ) that allows users to add comments to the articles.

I am probably going to be blogging a bit more about Sitecore and ASP .NET related subjects in the future. I also hope that this change of platform will increase my motivation for writing more posts, so the frequency of new posts should increase.