What does it need to build a successful implementation on Sitecore?

I will just make a short list after my experience.

From a managing point of view:

- a good PM who have budget and time under control
- i recomend a tracking tool like jiira, mantis,....
- good communication skills to customer
- a change request process
- if possible an agile PM like SCRUM or PRINCE2
- ask the customer about KPI and try to meet them if they are usefull
....

From a more technical point of view


- CI for sitecore with teamcity or jenkins (who else know good software for that?)
- code quality ckecks like sonar or fx cop (who else know good software for that?)
- coding guileline and some checks for it
- unit testing you code part with a complexity of > 4
- a proper dev environment
- SVN or some version control system shoulb be obvious
- do not use XSLT
- i proper system archtecture.
- knowledge about sitecore security. (do not put the sitecore folder on PROD publisher)
- knowledge of workflows, states and action if customer needing it
- check HTML click dummy for SEO (only one H1 element, meta tags,...)
- sitecore wants ONLY ONE form element.
- tell the designer that ID attribut in html tags are tabu for him!
- prepare customer that content editor is not running in EVERY browser
- think about performance. It not usefull to store more that 200 items under a item
- use inheritance an Helper classes to generate media URL, Urls, get pathes of Items,...
- think about proper authorization concept with roles and publishing right
- a must in every project is the taxonomy and the fallback module inj case you run a multilingal page!!
- a good Information architecute (IA). We use a as we call it a portlet system, like CQ5 uses container for a big variety of different content types. E.g. a text,image,video, form portlet where authors can easily create small content parts and build up their page. For me a very simple and nice IA. IA is a serious and important part! And you can provide more portlets if needed to fight again stagnation.

There is much much more to say, but there are the basics.

Discussion


  1. Deployment is a bit a pain. Haven't found a nice solution yet. And no TDS is not nice.
  2. Interesting discussion about XSLT. Many try to avoid it... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6905228/sitecore-presentation-not-using-xslt-renderings-at-all

Comments