Expert Systems

I know many of you follow this blog, but today's entry certainly did bring back memories. Those of us who worked when the IT industry (or maybe just the Internet industry, I am not THAT old :P) fired off probably all have some terrifying tale to tell that resembles todays entry in TheDailyWTF. Be it some director's nephew "who was a genuine whizkid with websites", old-skool Mainframe programmers adjusting to the new wave of computing or whatnot. Fortunately, these days, this phenomenon is pretty much a thing of the past. Mostly anyway. IT/Web projects have become business critical and are therefore generally regarded as something best left to proven professionals with at least something of a track record. But even professionals get it wrong. If we look at the article, Victor is probably what WTF describes as "A Complicator". In summary, described as: "There are some so deeply embedded within The Complicators, that they've acquired a sort of sixth-sense: the ability to find meta-problems ("a problem with the process of creating a solution for the actual problem") in virtually any solution. As we've all seen, the systems that these developers create often end up as a barely functional application comprised of a Matryoshka-doll-like nesting of problems and solutions." And this would all be funny if the most recent experience I had with such a type was "back in the 90s". It was actually very recent. As a Sitecore consultant (as in, a consultant working with the Sitecore product, not to be confused with a consultant working for Sitecore) I was recently tasked with what looked to be a very straightforward assignment. The client had oversold (which is impressive given the current state of financial affairs) and needed an extra pair of hands to wrap up some loose ends on a few existing projects and then help on the implementation of 1-2 new sites from scratch. The client didn't have years and years of experience in working with Sitecore, and therefore already had another professional Sitecore consultant on the task. He apparently came with an impressive track record, a good friend of the house and so on. All in all, this was promising to be a sweet deal and I was looking forward to it. The first week or so, I would be working on my own. No problem. I mean, that's what one would be thinking, no? Almost complete site, just a few issues with some "Related People" not showing quite like the client wanted it. Sounded like straight forward filtering to me, or possibly adjusting a few queries. I should know better by now, that to jump to conclusions ;-) Much to my surprise, when I started digging in, I found a Sitecore implementation unlike anything I've ever seen before. And I've seen quite a few. Both done in companies I worked for, in clients I've contracted to, in solutions I've been tasked to review. I was confident in my belief that I pretty much had this thing called "Sitecore" nailed and nothing could truly surprise me to any real extent. Well how about this then. Ever seen a entire Sitecore site done in just 1 rendering sitting hardcoded into 1 layout? Ever seen a Sitecore site with 3 layers of inherited templates (65 of them in all, just about) yet the ENTIRE site consisted of content items ALL based on just 1 "Mega Template" (aptly named "Page")? And being designed like this, ever tried to explain to your end user why there are 50 fields, and depending on what values you define in some of them, other fields need to have specific values set? Complicator indeed. We're not talking a simple website here either, mind you. While it is difficult to rate the complexity of a website, it had all the bits you would normally expect today. Content pages, menu structure, left hand navigation, right hand spot elements, you know. The works. Ok so. With the issue at hand; "Mr. So and So displays BELOW Mrs. This and That on the People Page. We need the order to be reversed" I started investigating. Now what probably should have been a 30 minute task ended up taking a couple of days of my time. Backtracking through an immense hierarchy of included XSLT renderings, mode="whatIneedNow" switches and so on - just to get a basic overview of how this Expert System was actually producing page output. Must be my limited mental capacity shining through, or me getting old or something. Or both ;-) See to build a site like this, essentially bypassing everything "Sitecore" except for perhaps "Sitecore-as-an-advanced-field-editor", one needs to come up with an alternative system. Enter "The Meta System". A sophisticated hierarchy of tags, metatags and content "blobs" which users could then (in theory, at least) tag up and ultimately have displayed on the site. See there was a "PeopleLister" meta component, an "Office" component, and if you happened to tag everything up just right - you would eventually get information out on your site. All generated by the very clever rendering Expert System. And as for the problem at hand, I guess the system didn't really consider the order People needed to be presented. Worse yet - this changed from time to time. Sometimes an alphabetical list of All People was needed, and sometimes the order (as in the case I was tracking) followed "silly business rules" (this is an actual quote). A week came and went, and I finally had the chance to confront my colleague-consultant. While my first inclination was to ask "WTF!?" I did start on a more subtle approach. After all, being a visitor to the client a consultant is expected to show some degree of humility - maybe they preferred it their way. Turns out they did. Q: But what about the Page Editor? Surely clients must have seen a Sitecore demonstration, Nicam or otherwise, and expect this to work? A: Nah, noone uses that anyway. It's not imporant. Q: Ok. So what about caching? Sitecore has little chance to implement much in terms of useful caching when all it sees is ONE rendering on ONE layout? A: That's not important. Servers are so quick today anyway. Q: Umm ok. Well then what about user security? How will you assign permissions in this hierarchy of metadata - controlling which users can actually access/change/delete what? A: We just give everyone "Is Administrator" permissions and write a guide. If they break anything we can always restore back. Q: Aha. Well how about integrating other Sitecore modules, like for eCommerce, SEO and so on? A: It can be done. Or we can just install those on a separate installation and run it on a sub domain. That's what the users want anyway, not to complicate things. Some may think I am kidding, sadly this is not the case :P Not to complicate things.... Sitecore Support, you have my heartfelt sympathies. I certainly hope you don't get many of these cases dumped into your support tool. And if you do, kudos for what must be endlessly much more patience than I have myself. After these initial rounds in the ring, everyone decided it was probably best I went on to greener pastures and left them to it ;-) Let me end this by pointing out what I have already pointed out in the past; please DO be aware that Sitecore is putting great effort into publishing guidelines, best practices and "Cookbooks" for how to approach Sitecore site implementation, development and handling. They're all on SDN. I haven't had time to read through ALL of them yet (shame on me); but if anyone has - is there a definition for Expert System in there? ;-)