We chat via phone with the authors of the new Sitecore book "Profession Sitecore 8 Development", Phil Wickland and Jason Wilkerson from RBA Consulting. We discuss who the book is for and what information it covers.

Links:

• Buy Profession Sitecore 8 Development
• Jason Wilkerson (@LonghornTaco) | Twitter
• CitizenSitecore — Jason's Blog
• Phil Wicklund (@philwicklund) | Twitter
• Strategy updates from Phil Wicklund — Phil's Blog
• Michael West (@MichaelWest101) | Twitter — Co-Author of the Powershell chapter
• Kamruz Jaman (@jammykam) | Twitter — Book reviewer
• Nick Wesselman (@techphoria414) | Twitter — Book reviewer
• Mike Reynolds (@mike_i_reynolds) | Twitter — Book reviewer
• RBA | A Digital and Technology Consultancy

Rounding out some of the more common Sitecore frameworks, we chat with Jason Bert about Fortis Collection, a mapping framework for working with Sitecore Items in a strongly typed way. We then dive into the world of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) and some of the challenges implementing this process with Sitecore and why it is worth the investment of time.

Links:

• Fortis Collection | A strongly typed, interface based, model of the Sitecore API
• Goblin Rocket Engineering — Jason's Blog
• @jason_bert — Follow Jason on Twitter
• @FortisStrong — Follow the Fortis project on Twitter

A lot of marketers who implement their site with Sitecore struggle with "what now" as they look to leverage the more advanced marketing features of Sitecore. We talk with Perficient's Rick Bauer on how to get started. We cover everyone's favorite - Personalization, but also look at some of the first step you need to take when using Sitecore's marketing tools.

Links:

• @Sitecordial — Follow Rick on Twitter
• Sitecordial on YouTube
• Rick's Blog
• SBOS — Sitecore Business Optimization Strategies

We talk with Akshay Sura about his various efforts to bring the Sitecore Community together.

Links:

• Akshay Sura – Akshay Sura's blog posts
• Sitecore Hackathon 2017
• @akshaysura13 — Follow Akshay on Twitter
• Catching Exceptions Episode 14: Akshay Sura
• Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Full Curriculum
• Sitecore Community Updates Mailing List — Get updates on what is happening in the Sitecore Community
• Join Sitecore Slack — Use this form to request access to the Sitecore Community Slack Team

His contibution to the Sitecore community is undeniable, in this episdoe we dive into some of Kam Figy's many open source tools.

Links:

• @kamsar — Follow Kam on Twitter
• Kam's Idea Log
• Dianoga — An automatic image optimizer for the Sitecore media library.
• Unicorn — A Sitecore utility designed to simplify deployment of Sitecore items across environments automatically
• Synthesis — Synthesis is a universal object mapper for Sitecore 7 and 8
• Core Sampler Episode 4: Sitecore Fellow Alex Shyba
• Sitecore Sidekick — Portland Sitecore Meetup demonstration of Sidekick

The Sitecore community is on a roll lately. Following meteoric rise of the Sitecore Slack Team, the sights were set on breaking free of the "Programming Questions Only" limitations of Stack Overflow by launching a Sitecore focused StackExchange site. In this episode we sit down with Mark Cassidy, who submitted the original proposal to StackExchange and was one of the many members of the Sitecore community to get the site approved and ultimately into public Beta.

Links:

• Sitecore Stack Exchange
• @cassidydotdk — Follow Mark on Twitter
• Into the core — Mark's Blog
• Sitecore Community Forums
• How do I prevent coconut milk from separating in Thai curry? — Derek's Thai Curry question on Seasoned Advice

Once you get started working on Sitecore, it is not long before someone mentions using Glass Mapper. This week, we sit down with its creator, Mike Edwards and talk about the origins of Glass Mapper, some pitfalls, along with whether you should be generating or hand rolling your models.

Links:

• Glass Mapper — Glass Mapper Home Page
• Michael Edwards (@mikeedwards83) | Twitter — Follow Mike on Twitter
• Glass Mapper on Githuib

Sitecore developers face with a brand new implementation often find themselves doing the same things over and over when starting a project. Ignition is an open source developer accelerator designed to help launch your Sitecore projects. In this episdoe, we talk with the originator of the framework, Jon Upchurch.

Links:

• Jon Upchurch (@sitecorejon) | Twitter
• Sitecore Ignition (@ignition_sc) | Twitter
• Sitecore Ignition Framework — Ignition's home on Github
• Sitecore Ignition Documentation
• Ignition Webinar: Working with Ignition - Overview - YouTube
• Sitecore Ignition: Getting Started - YouTube

In this episode, we sit down with Martina Welander from Sitecore and talk about Sitecore's ever improving documentation, data sources, and her quest make make things easier to understand for developers.

Links:

• Martina Welander (@mhwelander) | Twitter — Follow Martina on Twitter
• (MH) Welander — Martina's Blog
• Catching Exceptions Episode 9: Martina Welander - YouTube — Mark Styles interview with Martina Wellander
• Page Editor Recommended Practices for Developers — A Guide to Building for the Page Editor and Improving the Editor Experience. A lot still applies to Sitecore 8 and is a worthy read.
• xDB | Exercising Sitecore — Jonathan Robin’s xDB posts
• blog.boro2g.co.uk — Nick Hill's Blog
• Mike Robbins — Mike Robbin's blog
• Sears Tower — Ask any Chicagoan and it's still the Sears Tower

We talk with Michael West about getting started with Sitecore Powershell Extensions Code Editor Sitecore Module Sitecore Powershell Extensions Follow Michael on Twitter – @MichaelWest101