The target audience of this module are Sitecore developers who want to keep track of Item and Template changes while working on new features. It enables you to automatically track those changes and add additional Items manually to the process. At the end of your work, you can generate an Item Package which contains all those changes without having to go into the Package Designer and remember which Items you touched. All of this without leaving the Content Editor!
On YouTube, you can see the module in action: http://youtu.be/xjS5xvIT_Kc
This module was created during the Sitecore Hackathon 2015 by Kevin Brechbühl (@aquasonic), Tobias Studer (@studert) and Pascal Mathys (@rootix).
You can either install the module with a Sitecore package over the Installation Wizard or compile the source code into your Sitecore installation.
The module can be installed with the Installation Wizard in the Sitecore Desktop with the provided Sitecore package. For more information about package installations see this blogpost (it's not written for Sitecore 8, but the process is the same). There are no additional post installation steps needed, you can directly go and use the module.
It can be laso installed using the NuGet package.
The module can be installed via NuGet:
Install-Package Unic.PackMan
For Sitecore 6 and 7 there are specific Packages Unic.PackMan.Sitecore6 and Unic.PackMan.Sitecore7 available.
Otherwise you could also clone the repository from GitHub and build it manually. After cloning the repository, the following steps are required:
- Add Sitecore assemblies into
./libdirectory. Check the./lib/README.mdfile which files are needed. - If you wish to deploy the module to a local playground for testing, you can use the VS Publish feature. Open the Solution, right-click on the
Unic.PackMan.WebsiteProject and select "Publish...". You may want to define the webroot of your playground as target location.
Note: We use a private NuGet feed to manage the Sitecore dependencies. This should not be an issue for you, though. We disabled automatic package restore for the project and added the ./lib directory as an alternative source to check for referenced libraries. So you should be able to build and run the module without issues once you've completed the steps above.
The module contains one config file called Unic.PackMan.config in the App_Config\Include folder. Mainly there are different pipelines where you could add additional processors if you need to. In the <packman> node it's also possible to configure include and exclude rules for the item tracking. Please read the instructions within the config file for further information.
The module is compatible and tested with Sitecore 6, 7 and 8. Check the specific versions for Sitecore 6 and 7.
To start the tracking of the item changes, enable the Developer stripe in the Content Editor and click Start Tracking.
Every change on Items (which are not excluded in the configuration) will be tracked from now on. The tracking process ignores the Item languages and versions. If an Item changes, the whole item gets added to the Item package afterwards.
If you want to add an Item or a whole tree manually to the Item package (in case you don't make any changes on them), you can select the appropriate Item in the Content Editor and choose Add Item or its child entry Add Item with subitems.
If you have added an Item by accident or want to discard an automatically added Item, select it in Content Editor and click on Remove Item. In case the Item was choosen to include the children, the whole child tree gets removed from the Item package tracking. You can't remove only the child items. In this case, you have to select the relevant Items one by one.
If you have finished your work (and have at least one Item change), you can click on Generate Package to generate a package with all tracked Items. You have to choose a package name which will be part of the final package archive. If you have added many Items to the session, it can take some time to generate the Item package for you.
After the package is generated, it is stored in the ($data)/packages folder of your Sitecore solution and gets additionally downloaded by your browser for you.
The package metadata will contain the following information:
- Package Name: Your entered package name
- Author: The Sitecore user which created the package
- Version: The UTC Time while generating the package
The name of the generated ZIP-file will look like <date>-<package name>.zip to have them sorted in case multiple developers generate multiple packages.
As soon as there is at least one changed Item, the Tracked Items button will show you all tracked items in this Session.
Beside of the list of tracked Items, you can enable a so called Gutter to show directly in the content tree which Items are actually tracked. For enabling this, you have to right click into the most left bar and choose PackMan Tracking State to enable them.
The two different Icons show you whether the children of the Item are included.
If you have finished your tracking session, you can stop the tracking by clicking on Stop Tracking. You will be warned that all stored tracking information will be deleted if you do this. If you haven't generated the resulting Item package yet, do this first if you need the changes.
This module was built during a 24 hour hack session. We cannot guarantee that the output of the module is always 100% correct, so please check the results before rolling the packages out to production. It worked very well in our tests :)