Building a more intensive custom SPEAK application in Sitecore - Part 1

Summary

Target audience: Developers.

Reading time: Approximately 5 minutes.

While tons of the out of the box applications are incredibly useful for content editors, I've had a fish around and can't seem to find one that ties to goals, profile cards and personalisation. So, I thought "Hey, it'd be cool to have a dashboard button, and an interface on Sitecore dedicated to assigning goals, profile cards, etc. without having to access the items individually". So think about the Access Viewer in Sitecore, but for marketing. 

So to set sail on this little mini-project, I went straight to the Sitecore documentation on SPEAK applications. To add to this, tons of Sitecore advocates have already made tutorials, like this one and this one. 

So after reading through all of those blog posts, I started working on my own iteration of a SPEAK application. Through the help of an MVP of course (who happens to sit near me).

The configuration

My my, where do we start? Well, following the blog posts linked above, we need Sitecore Rocks set up - just for ease of use. You can do all this through the web content editor, but it's much easier to just work on one IDE. I won't go into detail with how to get and set Sitecore Rocks up, you get to do this if you do the Sitecore training module.

Okay, lets get to it

First, instead of having to type the URL to our application in the address bar, we want something accessible very quickly. And we want it on our trusty Sitecore Dashboard for when we log in. 

So to do this, spin up Sitecore Rocks, and navigate into the Core database, then navigate to "/sitecore/client/Applications/Launchpad/PageSettings/Buttons"

You can see a few existing launch pad 'groups' and these represent the groups of icons on the Sitecore Dashboard. If we expand each group, and compare them side by site the launch pad, it will start to look familiar:

 



Since our application is going to be related to goals, profile cards and personalisation, it makes sense to put it within the marketing group. So lets go ahead and do that.

Here's how we add a button:
In Sitecore rocks, right click on the Marketing launchpad group item, and navigate to Add->LaunchPad Button

Give it a meaningful item name -  I just called mine "Custom SPEAK Application" for now.

Fill in the text field - so it appears on the dashboard
Give it an icon - so you get something that represents the application instead of an empty square box.

Save your changes, and reload the dashboard page.

Note under the "Marketing Applications" group, we can now see our "Custom SPEAK Application" button. At the moment, this button does nothing, because we haven't really created the application yet. We can add a link to the button later, once we've created a landing page for our application. This is done on the button item under the "Behaviour" section.

That's it for part 1 - Now you can add a custom button to the dashboard page! In part 2, we'll talk about using the existing rendering to create the initial page of our application, and we'll start with a blank slate and work our way up from there.

Happy coding guys!