I have more than 30 Sitecore instances on my laptop, and I often need to have a clean of a specific version/revision of the product done quick.
With all the love PowerShell is having around Sitecore community, I have dreamed up a quick install script that performs the following actions:
A bit over a week ago I had a pleasure speaking at the Sitecore Virtual User Group, here is the recording for the ones who missed it.
I will be following up with a blog post series containing some of the code samples.
Let me know what you think!
Sitecore.Search extension aka AdvancedDatabaseCrawler- Other prototypes and super experimental stuff like ContentSilo, NameValueEx field, WorkflowBundle and more (if we have time)!
Partial Language Fallback
Sitecore USA will be conducting a brief 30 minute call for Sitecore Certified Developers tomorrow at 10 AM Pacific. Here is what we will be covering:
Ever wondered how Sitecore caches works? It is pretty cool, actually. Sitecore can cache the output of any presentation component that it is aware of (Sublayout, WebControl, XSL Rendering). Basically, this output may vary on data context (Context Item or Datasource), device, whether user is logged in or not, parameters passed to the rendering, query string and Context user: We just pushed an update to the SDN search, which included greatly enhanced search within Sitecore Community Blogs, and integrated SDN Forum. Now you should be able to search against any Sitecore resource from one place!
Among other enhancements, we’ve improved search relevancy by tweaking a few settings and ignoring landing pages.
Hope you see the difference.
Feel free to provide feedback, especially if your own blog is not getting indexed by us.
Enjoy!
If you guys have not seen this initiative, check it out: http://www.sitecoreug.org
The Sitecore Users' Virtual Group is dedicated to supporting the Sitecore community wherever they exist across the globe. There are some great speakers lined up for our first sessions and all sessions are free of charge and conducted over the web. Here is the schedule.
The first presentation will take place next Wednesday, May 18, at 9:00 AM Pacific, Noon Eastern, or 5:00 PM UK time. John West, CTO of Sitecore North America, will discuss the state of Sitecore and the CMS marketplace. John has graciously agreed to answer your questions.
If you would like to attend, please register here.
This is a really quick post dedicated to the following scenario. You have either a standalone asp.net web app or legacy website. You want to host it underneath the web root with Sitecore instance configured and have Sitecore completely ignore the whole path (“/webapp”).
The issue you may be having is that during the request, Sitecore would try to “take over” and resolve a dynamic item “webapp” from the content tree which obviously does not exist. So you would get a “document not found” error*:
*Depending on the version of IIS, you may be experiencing different behavior.
There is a quick way to resolve this. Simply add the path to your standalone website to the “IgnoreUrlPrefixes” list:
1: <!-- IGNORE URLS
2: Set IgnoreUrlPrefixes to a '|' separated list of url prefixes that should not be
3: regarded and processed as friendly urls (ie. forms etc.)
4: -->
5: <setting name="IgnoreUrlPrefixes"
value="/sitecore/default.aspx|/trace.axd|.....|/webapp" />
Now if your are not feeling nerdy today, stop reading and go fix it!
For the ones who continue reading, I can tell that the “ignore url magic” happens within the <httpRequestBegin /> pipeline which is invoked when the request goes through Sitecore.
So before the ItemResolver is hit, the “IgnoreList” processor would read the value of the “IgnoreUrlPrefixes” setting and figure out whether the pipeline needs to be aborted or not:
1: <httpRequestBegin>
2: ...3: <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.IgnoreList, Sitecore.Kernel" />
4: <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.SiteResolver, Sitecore.Kernel" />
5: ...6: <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver, Sitecore.Kernel" />
7: </httpRequestBegin>
That’s all folks!
Greetings,
Here is a quick guide about how to verify that your presentation components (XSLTs, WebControls or Sublayouts) are getting cached.
For more details on how the HTML caching works, see section “3.4.2 Managed Web Site Caches” within Cache Configuration Reference and Chapter 4 within “Presentation Component Reference”.
1. Enable caching settings for your presentation control
Depending on your needs and implementation specifics, you can apply caching on different levels:
- via Layout Details dialog:
- on the definition item of the presentation control:
- within the markup on the control itself if it is bound statically:
1: <form id="mainform" method="post" runat="server">
2: <div id="MainPanel">
3: <sc:XslFile ID="sampleXsl"
4: Path="/xsl/sample rendering.xslt"
5: Cacheable="true"
6: VaryByData="true"
7: runat="server" />
8: <sc:placeholder key="content" runat="server" />
9: </div>
10: </form>
More details about it can be found within Chapter 4 of the “Presentation Component Reference” document. Here is one important snippet from this doc:
When you dynamically bind a rendering to a placeholder using layout details, cache settings explicitly defined in layout details override cache settings defined in the rendering definition item.
Cache settings defined in the definition item apply only when no caching settings exist in the Caching section in the Control Properties dialog.
This post does not explain the difference between cache variation settings like VaryByData or VaryByDevice. Consult the official documentation mentioned above in order to find appropriate strategy for your site.
2. Verify that the change to the cache setting got published to the “web” database.
For that, you can use the database selector at the bottom right corner and then open Content Editor to browse the content of the published database.
In a distributed server scenario, such things as cache clearing may be factoring in. So make sure that the data cache is properly cleared after publishing.
3. Use Sitecore Debugger to explore Trace
After you confirm that the cache setting were published, verify that Sitecore is caching it using Sitecore Debugger. The article is for Sitecore 5.3 but most concepts are still valid for your version.
3.1 To start the debugger, click on the “Debug” item in the menu:
3.2 When the debugger is launched, make sure to disable “Rendering Information” feature, otherwise caching won’t work within the debugger:
3.3. Locate the page where the presentation component is placed.
3.4. Refresh the page a couple of times.
3.5. Scroll down to the “Trace” section and locate your rendering:
If the control is cached, you should see the highlighted (using cache) string.
4. Rendering Statistics page
Another way to confirm is to launch the “Rendering Statistics” page: /sitecore/admin/stats.aspx where you can see the number of times your rendering is fetched from cache vs. total render count:
As you may have guessed, the value within the “From cache” column should not be zero.
5. Verify that HTML caching is turned on.
If the steps above indicate that presentation component is not getting cached, consult you’re the cache page: /sitecore/admin/cache.aspx
5.1 Find the current site that you’re running. By default, it should be “website”.
5.2 Find the column for html cache of your website.
5.3 Verify that the MaxSize column is not set to zero.
6. Verify the configuration
If the cache page shows zero, then it’s time to review your configuration.
Within web.config, make sure that:
6.1 Default HTML cache size is not set to zero:
1: <setting name="Caching.DefaultHtmlCacheSize" value="5MB"/>
6.2 Locate your website definition within the <sites /> section and make sure that cacheHtml is set to “true” and the value of “htmlCacheSize” is not set to zero:
1: <site name="website" ... cacheHtml="true" htmlCacheSize="10MB" />
6.3 Locate the <cacheSizes /> section next to the <sites /> section. Make sure that the html cache is not set to zero here too:
1: <cacheSizes>
2: <sites>
3: <website>
4: <html>10MB</html>
5: ...6: </website>
7: </sites>
8: </cacheSizes>
This should be more or less sufficient in order to troubleshoot html cache issues.
HTH.
Dreamcore is just around the corner and I am fully immersed in my presentation.
The topic is “Building Successful and Efficient Multilingual Solutions with Sitecore”.
My plan is to spend a few minutes showing the fundamentals of multilingual support in Sitecore and then drill down into the use cases and some real world scenarios I’ve witnessed over a few years.
I believe this format will be suitable for the beginners who are thinking about a multilingual implementation and also for the experienced folks as I have a few secret tricks up my sleeve!
If there anything specific you would expect from my presentation, please keep the comments coming.
By the way, full Dreamcore 2011 agenda can be found here:
http://www.sitecore.net/en/Events/Dreamcore2011/Agenda.aspx
Hope to see you there!
WebDAV allows users of Web clients such as browsers to manage files on Web servers using Web protocols such as HTTP or HTTPS. With WebDAV, users can drag-and-drop files between the Windows desktop and the browser.I would recommend disabling this feature on the Content Delivery side as WebDAV is not expected to be used there.
Greetings!
One of our partners asked me yesterday about my thoughts on upgrading. Whether Sitecore recommends upgrading to 6.4 as of now or not. Also, just stumbled upon this great discussion here on Kim Hornung’s blog!
This is quite an interesting and thought provoking question, and I don’t think there could be a single answer to that and I also think that Sitecore has been doing a great job not forcing customer’s to upgrade. At the end of the day, it is your customer’s requirements and expectations that should drive the decision. With Sitecore’s successful hotfix process, if you have an issue that is a showstopper, you can request a quick hotfix from the Customer Service rather than upgrading your whole infrastructure!
Click on the image to expand.
Please note that this is not an official recommendation from Sitecore. Rather, these are my personal thoughts on the subject.
With 6.3.1 being recommended, I’ve updated the image.
I have been thinking about this for a while, and finally decided to create another Sitecore blog on our Community area dedicated to sharing my experiences in the field working closely with implementation partners:
http://www.sitecore.net/AlexShyba
My ambitious plan is too continue sharing anything deeply technical here while the new blog would be a place where technical meets business half way.
Hope you enjoy it!
I would like to announce the formation of the first and only Sitecore User Group in the Bay Area.
My vision is to create a dedicated community for passionate Sitecore developers and end users devoted to learning new things and sharing experience about everything related to Sitecore CMS. Anybody can join. You can be either a beginner or experienced Sitecore developer, or end user.
Since Sitecore USA is headquartered in San Francisco, you have an amazing opportunity to get new information about the product directly from the vendor and get to meet the Sitecore folks!
The user group’s home is here. Join us!
What could be more fun than meeting your fellow Sitecore Enthusiasts and visiting beautiful Boston, especially in springtime? Learning about what’s new coming out, share ideas and best practices.
Well, you must have heard, we are doing it again!
As we still working hard on the agenda, but here are two known facts:
1. Yes, I will be speaking about common implementation scenarios. Specifics are coming soon.
2. Now exclusive information…just overheard it in the corridors of the marketing department.
This time we are going to have a special guest speaker: Carl Franklin!
In the world of technology, you know Carl as one of the first VB programmers, an extra famous Microsoft enthusiast, and of course, a founder and co-host of .NET Rocks!, an Internet audio talk show for people like you an me.
Again, specifics will be coming later, but rest assured that Carl’s inspirational message will leave no doubt that .NET Rocks! Along with that, we will be doing our own part, and show you exactly why Sitecore Rocks!
It is going to be so much fun! See you all in Boston!
Dreamcore 2011 is coming April 19-20, 2011 in Boston. Sign up now!
Here is a late Christmas present for the Sitecore community. A “ColorPicker” custom field that helps storing color codes in Sitecore.
The idea is simple: have a single line text box for color code storage and present the user with a good looking dialog to pick the color.
Technically speaking, there are two ways of color picking implemented.
The first approach is using native Internet Explorer’s color picker dialog and it is getting called via JavaScript.
The second one is using a custom built XamlSharp dialog with a ColorPicker control from ComponentArt. If you are using non IE browsers, the second dialog will be called.
Here is a short video about how it works. Turn those mics on!
Here are the installation steps:
1. Download the appropriate Sitecore package.
If you are planning on building the project yourself, use the “ColorPicker field items only” package.
2. Install it via Sitecore desktop.
3. After the installation, new custom field called “Color Picker” should be registered with the system.
To verify it, switch to “core” database and go to the following location: “/sitecore/system/Field types/Simple Types”
The “Color Picker” field should be there and should look like this:
Short user guide:
1. If the installation was successful, you can start using it.
2. Find the template you want to play with.
3. Create a field of type “Color Picker”
4. Create an item from this template.
5. Enjoy.
This shared source module has been implemented in collaboration with Artem Loboda (compent.dk).
Developed and tested on 6.4 Update-1. Expected to work with 6.3. There could be compatibility issues with earlier releases.
All the sources are published to our Shared Source Library. Thanks for the help, Jimmie :-)
http://trac.sitecore.net/ColorPicker/browser/Trunk