So you have a presentation control (let’s say a sublayout) that relies on Sitecore.Search APIs to get the data to render (news articles for example). Second ingredient in this recipe is HTML cache that you have enabled for this control. The third ingredient is a dedicated Content Delivery server.
You’ve got yourself a race condition between IndexingProvider and HTML Cache!
It’s time to revisit my old blog series from a couple of years ago. I’ve blogged about ways to setup a pre-production preview environment back in 2009 and 2010. I suggest reviewing those before reading this post further, as I am not going to provide a lot of context. Since the last post, I was getting even more questions about how to set this up, so here is another take on the same problem that involves less customization, and in my book, it’s much easier to setup.
The idea is simple and rotates around the notion of running kind of a “Live mode” on separate Pre-Production Preview server.
This server will source out content from the master database instead of “pre-prod web” database. This will let you get away from using publishing, thus reducing complexity.
LocalDb is a great way to run embedded SQL on your dev box, so you don’t end up with hundreds of databases attached in your SQL Mgmt Studio.
Amazon announced yesterday that they are lowering prices for Amazon EC2, and, what’s even more exciting, a new “medium” instance is available now, which fits nicely into what Sitecore needs to run quite comfortably. Here is the quote from the announcement:
“…We are also announcing a new Amazon EC2 instance type, m1.medium. This new instance provides customers with 2 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute power, 3.75 GB of memory, and 410 GB of instance storage, making it ideal for many enterprise applications that require a reasonable amount of CPU and memory, but do not require all the resources of an m1.large instance type. The m1.medium instance type is available in all regions and supports both 32 and 64-bit architectures. To learn more about Amazon EC2 instance types, including pricing for m1.medium instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 detail page.”
An affordable sandbox it seems. Pretty sweet, huh?
Ok, here is something completely experimental. Consider the following real world example from Sitecore’s website. You have a section called “Customers” and you have a left rail where the leftnav typically sits. Now your marketers want the “call-to-action” rendering to be placed below the leftnav:
…and what’s important, have it cascade to all child pages (let’s take this as an example).
Another thing they want to make sure is to lock it down on those child pages so nobody can do anything with it in Page Editor (move, change properties, etc,)
Pretty interesting scenario, heh?
Alright, I’ve been wanting to blog about this for years now. Some recent posts on twitter inspired me. Finally. If you following ‘sitecore’ on twitter, you may be seeing a few tweets that apparently have nothing to do with Sitecore, it’s products and services, so when you look at the shortened URL in the tweet you see something like this:
http://www.site.com/en/sitecore/content/site1/news/blabla.aspx
I seriously doubt that anybody would disagree with me saying that Visual Studio 2010 is the best IDE to date on the planet. With the extension like Sitecore Rocks, TDS and Resharper, the Sitecore development simply cannot be more pleasant and productive.
I’ve just recently discovered a few more Visual Studio extensions that are extremely powerful, especially in Sitecore context.
A post about one of the most random problems ever. I was pulling my hair out for a while on this one, thus this definitely deserves the right to be highlighted in the “Friday Case” category.
Specifically I am referring to the Sitecore Active Directory module and it’s new feature called “Custom Filters” that was added in the latest version 1.0.3 rev.111005.
Some customers were asking for it, so here is what you can do now.
