Using Sitecore XConnect API can get thick. Here is a developer snippet to consolidate and simplify the task of saving contact data.

With the embrace of local datasources and the luxury of general use components, a dilemma arises. These features cannot live on a Sitecore template's Standard Values item.

Looking for more Sitecore tools to add to your belt? Here are a couple utilities that you might find useful.

Content authors don’t need to see the Header and Footer while editing page content, so let’s gift them with a speed boost and provide a feature to skip them.

The best Sitecore solutions I’ve seen use component driven design. This eases future maintenance and gives a plug-n-play feel where you can add or remove modular, well-defined features.

Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) and other similar solutions leveraging dynamic placeholders provides page designers with a powerful set of reusable components.

The other day I was looking for a way to handle a common dilemma with MVC forms and Sitecore. It goes like this: Put an “Add To Favorites” button in the page header and an email subscription form in the footer. Both do form posts. If the developer uses a common MVC form technique (reusing the action name, just decorating [HttpGet] or [HttpPost]) then both forms get submitted. Sign up for the newsletter and voila, you’ve favorited the page! Whoops. This is because the HTTP post verb is global to the page request.

Ever need to personalize Sitecore rendering parameters? Sitecore's conditional renderings allow you to override the datasource and/or the component. However we often run into the need to override rendering parameters too. It may be the desire to simply change a color that is specified as a component property. Or it may be something more critical like what I ran into last week with Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA). SXA has a mechanism called rendering variants. This is very cool for reusable components, such as Page Content.

Application Insights is an Application Performance Management service which notably has a user interface to filter and view logged messages and is rising in popularity with Sitecore implementations. Sitecore has made an implementation available for cloud deployments that sends Sitecore logging and performance counters to Application Insights. We can borrow it for any Sitecore instance even those not hosted in the cloud.