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This blog is powered by Jekyll, a static site generator. There is no database, nothing to search against, the site is simply composed of a few HTML pages referencing each other. Being search experts, we can leverage Coveo to add powerful search to Jekyll.

Coveo for Sitecore offers various extension points to easily customize almost every part of it : indexing, queries, interfaces etc. In the developers documentation, we’re often giving examples of custom pipelines or JavaScript snippets, but what happen if you guys want to do more than that?

As the UX design department grows at Coveo we start to get enough manpower to actually create stuff before it’s implemented (yep…). One of these concepts is for an online community.

The idea for this project came from an internal initiative to unify the search on our various websites. You’re probably familiar with how great Coveo is at this kind of problem. Basically, it’s what we do. I was tasked to create mockups for this initiative. As I was working on this, another idea came up. We have Coveo staff who are communicating directly with developers. We have online resources (a lot) that are frequently updated. Maybe we could bring all of this together. We talked about it in our meetings with the design team and soon it started consuming me.

In our awesome cloud Usage Analytics API, there is a call that returns the analytics data in data points format (these are meant to be used to build a graph). Recently, we added a feature allowing the user to choose the time period (initially, only days was available). Problem is, the code was strongly coupled with the day period…

##The Non-Scratching

Our days are packed. We work on bug fixes, we work on features that have been sold to clients, on pieces required before the next rollout or it may be on the new architecture. We work on things that have a due date or that somebody is waiting for. We don’t have much time to ponder and wonder about all those little things we would like to change or those ideas we have; for all those itches we lack the time to scratch.

How do we encourage people to scratch the itch even if they are not part of our planning? Enter the Hackathon.

I’ve been working remotely for more than two years now, and I thought I’d add my own experience to the rather large amount of similar posts out there on the web.

At Coveo, we love to tackle new technologies. Last year was all about TypeScript, preprocessed stylesheets with LESS/SASS and optimizing our JavaScript applications with minification, concatenation and compression. Since we have a Java stack in the cloud, using the build tools that were already in place was a no brainer. We started with an Ant script to manage the build process of the Cloud Admin Web Application.

If you haven’t deployed the insight panels in your organization yet, here is a link to the procedure to get it done: Installing the Coveo for Salesforce Application.

Out of the box there are several predefined Insight Panels with pertinent queries. That is a great starting point, but even more usefulness can be attained by customizing the insight panels to meet the needs and the ways of working of the users.

UnderscoreJS is probably one of my favorite template engines. I’ve been working with Mustache or Handlebars, and they just don’t offer the same flexibility as Underscore. Even more, we’ve been using this framework extensively in our JavaScript UI Framework, always delivering great results.

A query ranking expression (QRE) modifies the ranking score of search results matching a query expression.