Sitecore 9 Dynamic Placeholders And Why we need them

As many of us have faced the issue of repeating content when trying to use same placeholder name, Sitecore 9 has filled this gap by introducing support for Dynamic Placeholders in Out of the Box installation.

Problem Statement and when to use Dynamic Placeholders:

In the below example I will reproduce an issue when I use a standard Sitecore placeholder:

That is:

I have created here:

1. Layout.cshtml  - A layout file with 3 placeholders: Header, Main, Footer
2. Sublayouts 
• Section - A sublayout view with following code:
• 1 Column - A sublayout view with following code.
3. A Hero image component - This a sample component for example. We can use any other component. It contains 2 fields: Title, Image.

Important Note: None of the above placeholders will allow us to add a rendering in it if we don’t create a placeholder setting item for them under: /sitecore/layout/Placeholder Settings.

Creating and Installing Sitecore packages programmatically

We can create and save a Sitecore packages on disk using code.
Following method takes List of items as an input parameter and can be used to package the supplied items:

Note: The above code will create the package for you in the C drive/ Data folder.

Moving Archived items from one Sitecore instance to another

In continuation to my previous posts I will be sharing some steps in which we can package up the Archived items and move them from one Sitecore instance to another.
This can be a requirement for many migration projects.

Note: We can only create a package for items which are in content tree(i.e non Archived/deleted).

Following are the steps we can follow to move archived items:
1. Get list of all archived items from source instance master DB. (programmatically)
2. Restore the list of archived items from step 1 to the source instance. (programmatically)
3. Create Sitecore items package of the restored items. (programmatically)
4. Archive the restored items again on source instance DB. (programmatically)
5. Grab the sitecore package created in step 3 above and install it on the destination instance.
6. Read items from the package and archive them.

How to Archive and Restore Sitecore Items programmatically

Content Author can archive items any time from Sitecore client by using Archive button in the Review tab.

And later can restore the archived items form the Archive application.

However, we can have a situation where we need to archive or restore items based on some action.
Following is the code which can be used to archive items programmatically:

Copy bulk Sitecore Items between instances

Today I am going to talk about a very common issue which we face when working with more than one environments/instances of Sitecore.

Moving bulk content and specially media items is a tedious task for which I have written this blog post.
We have some tools that can do the job for us but most of them need paid license to use.
Another way to achieve this is by using a very powerful Sitecore scripting tool called as Sitecore powershell extensions(SPE).

Firstly, we will talk about the tools that can help moving bulk content items:

1. TDS/Unicorn: These are 2 similar tools, which can be used to serialize items and then sync across various instances of Sitecore. TDS is having more features but needs paid license to use. Unicorn is free and can be used to setup for serializing the items.
2.  Razl : This is a great tool created by Hedgehoge, which can be used to compare and move items from one instance to other. Using this we can compare 2 databases side by side and simply move items from left to right and vica-versa.

This tool can be very useful as it gives us the clear picture of all items and there presence in each instance.