Yesterday was my first day using Sitecore. We have various applications in place that I will look through to gain further knowledge, but right off the bat I thought I would start from the ground up.

The first thing I did yesterday was compile a list of RSS feeds for my Google reader account. I found a good Sitecore Aggregated RSS Feed that was put together Lars Fløe Nielsen which links together a ton of various Sitecore related RSS feeds. I also did a little homework on various blogs of Sitecore MVPs and Employees so I could keep my fingers on what is going on around in the Sitecore community. Here are a few blogs you might find helpful if you are new to Sitecore:

Alistair Deneys: http://adeneys.wordpress.com/category/net/sitecore/
Christopher Wojciech: http://blog.wojciech.org/
Julius Ganns: http://jgnk.spaces.live.com/
Mark van Aalst: http://www.markvanaalst.net/
Mark Cassidy: http://www.cassidy.dk/blog/sitecore/
Thomas Eldblom: http://mcore.wordpress.com/
Alex de Groot: http://sitecore.alexiasoft.nl/
Alex Shyba: http://sitecoresupport.blogspot.com/
Anders Dreyer: http://sitecore.blogspirit.com/
Jacob Christensen: http://jesperen.wordpress.com/
Lars Floe Nielsen: http://larsnielsen.blogspirit.com/

My first step was to register/install Sitecore. I decided to go with the Sitecore Express version for my own personal review first, on my own personal server so I could get as crazy as I wanted with it without affecting anything on the servers here at the office. I’m running a shared hosting account at MaximumASP with SQL Server 2008 Express installed, IIS 7, Windows Server 2008. My development environment will be the .Net 3.5 Framework with Visual Studio 2008, Windows Vista Business,  SQL Server 2008 Express.

If you are like me you are probably too intelligent to stop and read through instructions before jumping into something (or at least think you are as in my case), but here are Sitecore’s installation instructions in case you are someone who likes that sort of thing.

The download of Sitecore Express was 128mb, fairly reasonable size for a CMS. After I ran the install (on the server), it prompted me to verify that I was running with IIS6 compatibility components installed. This was fairly painless and I was impressed that Sitecore included instructions with the install on how to validate that this was done. I am always a fan of preventative measures and this may have saved me a lot of time in the end.

I actually have Windows Vista Home Premium installed on one of the boxes at work (my bad) and I tried to install Sitecore on that box at the same time I was installing it on the server and it failed… You need Windows Vista Business to run Sitecore successfully. I could have continued with the installation, but I did not. Instead I installed it on my laptop which runs Vista Business with IIS. My laptop was actually not set up to run IIS when I began the install, but again the installation prompted me and warned me before continuing. I ran into a few problems with the install on my laptop, installer failed a few times, I ran as administrator and it started up no problem (if this happens to you, punch yourself in the gut every time… sooner or later you will start to remember). After installation I did run into a snag on my laptop with a HTTP Error 500.19 because the ASP.Net 2.0 Framework was not properly registered. After registering it I ran the application locally successfully. Note: The installer seemed to suggest it would handle this, but did not for whatever reason… I am running a 64bit OS on my laptop so I registered the 2.0 Framework from the Framework64 folder and it worked… perhaps the installer did not?

During the installation it will ask you to point to a valid license file (this will be e-mailed to you as part of the registration process before downloading Sitecore). The license file is valid for a year, but can be renewed upon request. The rest of the install was pretty seemless. I did pause for a moment when prompted regarding SQL Server vs. SQLite (I have no direct experience with SQLite and I am curious to know more). I opted for SQL Server (choose this option for SQL Express as well). One thing I noticed is that it will create the databases in SQL Server for you and store the MDF/LDF files within the installation directory. This was a bit unusual to me. I expected it to run scripts to create the databases, but did not expect it to store the MDF/LDF files locally. The reason this stood out to me was because after installation I attempted to move the directory and re-direct IIS to a different folder. This broke SQL Server Management Studio, so I had to basically copy to a new directory first (not cut) then move the pointers in SQL Server Management Studio to the new MDF/LDF files. I also had to change a field in the web.config of the application called dataFolder from its original path to its new path. I had to also make sure permissions were set correctly on the new folder (set Network Service permissions appropriately on the new folder) and finally I had to just make sure IIS was pointing to the new/correct location. Fairly painless and it could have been a lot worse.

Overall the documentation would have saved me some headaches and it did help me resolve my ASP.Net registration problem.

I have had many more problems than this with other CMS products, the Windows Server 2008 installation seemed to go a lot more smoothly than it did on my Windows Vista box, which one would never use as a production server anyway.

One last quick note. To get the full functionality of the CMS (from an administrative perspective) you will need to use IE, I recommend IE7. If you use Firefox (which is actually my browser of choice) you will have limited functionality.