CMO and EPiServer 9

I got a question about CMO this week and because I never have done anything with it, I thought I would check it out. To my surprise I found that you can’t just install the package into a new website, the packages that are available ate just updates for CMO, but you will have to use the deployment center of the old days and go through the process of upgrading. Which is very tiresome and I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the deployment center on my box anymore.

I created a VM, installed the deployment center, created a website with CMO through it, went to the upgrade process and finally… I could check out CMO. Now this is not a process I wish to repeat for every customer who wants to start using CMO, so I took the module, the webservice, created a transformation file for all the settings that need to be added to the web.config and created a NuGet package for it. I also added the SQL script from the original install files to the tools directory in the package.

You can use the package to add all the base files to your project, your web.config will be updated with the necessary settings. The only manual action required is:

• run the sql script in the tools directory on the DB you want to use
• update the CMO connection string, just the {YOURDB} part
• install the latest CMO package from EPiServer, which gives you the dll’s and some updates to the views.

You can download all from GitHub or use the NuGet package in the releases tab. I won’t upload it to the official EPiServer feed, as it is kind of a hack.

If you have experience with CMO and find something missing, let me know.