This is the first open source crowdsourced book on Sitecore MVC. It is going to be entirely written using Markdown and hosted on GitHub. We will follow the guidelines of the brand new GitbookIO project which will allow us to publish our book online.
After having researched online for good resources on Sitecore MVC, I found that there are bits and pieces of information here and there, some of great quality. This gave me the idea that, working together, the Sitecore community has the potential to be able to create a valuable book about this topic. So I opened the SitecoreMVC GitHub account and started tweeting about this idea.
The initial response shows some interest by the Sitecore community on Twitter. In just a few hours from the initial tweet I was able to exchange a few tweets with Martina Welander, who is a Technical Consulting Engineer at Sitecore and who has been focusing primarily on Sitecore MVC. Martina agrees that this project should focus on trying to capture real life Sitecore MVC experiences, possibly by showcasing an array of different case studies. Using Martina's words,
this is something that only the community can provide [and will] differentiate [this project] from plain docs.
Martina's feedback is very important to me, because it confirms that having chosen to use the Github platform (instead of using a more document-oriented platform, such as Wiki) will give us the ability to include code, not just in the body of the pages, but literally as downloadable Visual Studio solution(s).
If you are interested in participating in this project, now that the Table of Contents is almost done, and the refactoring needed to make the book structure Gitbook compliant is almost finished, it's time to start entering content!!
Keep in mind that this is a living project, which means that very few things are set in stone. Chapters will be added / moved and removed as the community see fit.
Just fork and submit a pull request (see below) to submit your ideas / content! If your pull request does not fit the Gitbook guidelines I will help with that.
Furthermore, you can always check the current list of milestones and the open issues. Adding a new issue is the best way to propose an idea to the entire community.
As clearly explained in one of the Github Help pages,
the fork & pull model lets anyone fork an existing repository and push changes to their personal fork without requiring access be granted to the source repository. The changes must then be pulled into the source repository by the project maintainer. This model reduces the amount of friction for new contributors and is popular with open source projects because it allows people to work independently without upfront coordination.
Therefore, submitting a Pull Request is going to be the best way to submit your content to the book.
My name is Francesco Gallarotti (@gallarotti on Twitter) and I will be the project maintainer. Feel free to contact me if you have ideas and/or suggestions. And, please, don't forget to share this project with all your colleagues and friends that could be interested in participating!
Thank you!!
The following people have contributed to the book (in random order):
- Francesco Gallarotti (@gallarotti on Twitter)
- Saber Karmous
- Sean Holmesby (@seanholmesby on Twitter)
- Robbert Hock (@kayeeNL on Twitter)
- Jukka-Pekka Keisala (@jpkeisala on Twitter)
- Mickey Rahman (@mickrhm on Twitter)