So I’ve recently joined this company and they use EPiServer as a base and build custom functionality on top of that. Therefore I was required to learn how the CMS works in order to fulfill my role as a .NET Web Developer.
The very first thing I needed to do was to get a dev version on my local machine. On Episerver’s website, I downloaded the version we used most in the company (EPiServer CMS 6 R2) and then I launched the installation process. The setup did not go smoothly as it got aborted because it could not create the database. My Windows credentials were not given the right permission on MS SQL Express 2012 (blame the System Administrator!). Anyway, once that got sorted, I installed the Alloy Tech sample website from EPiServer Deployment Centre. However that was just a blank project with just core files, contrary to what I was expected to see. The thing is I was following a tutorial from a blog and it had screenshots of what the website was supposed to look like but the end result for me was completely different. Later I found out the blog was outdated.
Next it was time getting used to Page Types, something that the CMS uses a lot. Once you get an understanding of that, everything else starts to make more sense. Then comes the querying of the CMS, for example, search for a a list of specific page type starting from the homepage. You can achieve this by creating a criteria query or using PageTypeBuilder (PTB), the latter being more strongly typed. Note that PTB is an open source project which needs to be imported in the project before you can use its awesomeness.
So far so good but still a long way before mastering the CMS; the coding is the easy one 🙂