Missing Templates with Email Campaign Manager in Sitecore 7.5

I have been working with debugging some Sitecore issues as of late and they have all seemed to deal with modules or packages being installed. Frustratingly, it seems like there is a different outcome among instances when I install a module on a Test server, and install the same module into a clone of a site on my local development, or another developer's machine. The latest culprit is the Email Campaign Manager (ECM).

Installed into a Staging server, the ECM module worked fine, allowing us to go through and create messages and test the system. However, I installed the same exact package into my local development environment, that was basically a clone of Staging, and when I went to create a message, the template options were empty.

Sitecore Search - Part 1 - Introduction

Using a search-based approach instead of native APIs is a great way to improve the experience users have with your Sitecore application, for performance and usability, among other reasons. LINQ to Provider is the search API piece of LINQ to Sitecore that allows you to develop search-centered solutions in Sitecore.

LINQ to Provider uses a LINQ query syntax to abstract your code, and focus, from the provider specific query parser. As a developer, this means flexibility and efficiency, since you can write some search code for a Lucene based search project, and move that code to a SOLR based project with little modification. And you don’t have to construct provider specific queries yourself.

Sitecore List Fields - Item Not Found in Selection

I recently wrote an extension library for Sitecore to simplify setting values for fields.

Because of the way the specific field classes are created in Sitecore, setting values specific to the type of field can be tricky. For text-based fields, like Single-Line Text, Multi-Line Text, Rich Text, and a few others, you can actually set the value directly on a generic Field object with relative ease. For more complex types like lists, links, and images, though you can set the value directly on a generic Field object, setting the more specific options for the value needs more care.

So, I wrote an extension library to look at the Field type and set the value using the best method for that type. It worked great as far as I could tell, until I looked a little deeper during my "QA phase". And wouldn't you know it, it turns out there is a funky behavior with the list fields.

Organizing Views in Sitecore

I have recently been working on a Sitecore project that is not terribly complicated, but has the potential to support multiple sites. The sites are similar in structure, and they will share some components, but there are many pieces of them that will be unique enough to warrant their own Views.

And with that magic word you can probably guess that this Sitecore instance is built with MVC. For a little more information about it, this instance of Sitecore is running version 7.5 and MVC 5.1 with Razor syntax.

The Problem

The problem is I want to keep an organized structure for my site not only with my Sitecore architecture, but also for my Controllers and Views. I am dealing with a Sitecore instance that will host multiple sites in the near future, so I have structured Sitecore to have different site-specific folders in my Content, Layouts, Media Library, and Templates sections. There are also Global folders in these sections where I will store items that are universal, but the specifics around my architecture can be saved for another post.