In the beginning…

Waaaay back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth I was fortunate enough to be a participant in EPiServer Developer training. Previous to this, I had been involved in the development of many APS.NET web sites and been actively involved in the development and implementation of a small number of CMS’s.

My first response to EPiServer CMS was, and continues to be, very positive – most notably I found the transition from “standard” ASP.NET / previous CMS systems to EPiServer development to be straight forward and relatively hassle free.

For those of you who are seasoned ASP.NET developers and are new to EPiServer development – welcome to the team and breathe a breath of fresh air.

So, back to the training class and my first steps… My first quest was to learn EPiServer in the eyes of a publisher and administrator. The learning curve had a relatively small gradient, due to experience in previous CMS systems.

The next quest was to master the basics – create new page types, display the properties of the page types and start to integrate them into something meaningful. Creating new page types was straight forward – and to my excitement – can be done programmatically – more on that a little later on.

The majority of the next few hours in the training class, and days afterwards were spent experimenting with EPiServer and learning the basics of the SDK, i.e. how to retrieve pages, how to use the EPiServer controls and how to extend EPiServer’s functionality. The sdk.episerver.com site became my new friend and I was quick to get a handle on the Singleton DataFactory class.

So, within a few days I was comfortably able to pump out some beginner level functionality and develop a basic EPiServer CMS web site.

My overall experience so far has been “thumbs up”. I’m looking forward to getting into the depths of the CMS side of the product and taking it to new and exciting heights. Stay tuned!