Have you just started with Keystone for Sitecore? Getting your feet wet and have questions? As one of the architects involved in the building of the Keystone development accelerator, I am starting up a new section of this site to provide regular posts on areas of interest, hidden nuggets, and other things you won’t necessarily see in the official manuals.

It should be noted that this is not the official support site for the Keystone product. If you really need urgent help, make sure to contact Keystone support to have your issue reviewed.

The goal of this area is for me to be able to provide you with info, “how-to” guides, and answers to common questions, much like I’ve done for products like Team Development for Sitecore, Trello, Visual Studio Online, and other tools that I’ve come across. So let’s get started!

Kicking things off… with MVC

Keystone will shortly be supporting Sitecore MVC and this will mean a lot of questions from developers who want to get started with Keystone but aren’t familiar with MVC or Sitecore’s particular support for it. Here are a few starter tips:

1. Sitecore MVC resources are your friends!
   Bookmark mhwelander.net. Seriously. Great stuff.
2. Keystone does not lock you down.
   You will get both MVC and WebForms components, though I recommend building your site consistently with one type and not creating both MVC and Web Forms pages.
3. Get to know your Controller.
   Sitecore supports both controller renderings and view renderings. Keystone MVC components are implemented as controller renderings where the Controller will determine the view, not Sitecore. You can choose to build your own components as view renderings and they will work side-by-side with Keystone’s components.
4. Learn to love the ViewModel.
   Keystone moves most of the traditional Web Forms component server-side code into the Controller and ViewModel classes. This allows for clean views that simply focus on presentation. If you need to extend a Keystone component, you will most likely need to extend the appropriate ViewModel class as well.

As the weeks go by, I’ll dive more deeply into some areas. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer!