Monday, July 30, 2012

Sync up Sitecore Search Index Update and HTML cache clear


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!

Thursday, July 05, 2012

Sitecore Pre-Production Preview


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.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Sitecore on SQL 2012 “Denali” with LocalDb


SNAGHTML7010a5SQL 2012 codename “Denali” is now RTM since March 7th, which means I can start leveraging the new LocalDb feature with Sitecore!

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.

Friday, March 09, 2012

Amazon EC2 and Sitecore - great news


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?

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Cascading renderings in Sitecore Page Editor [Experimental]


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:
 SNAGHTML9837b0a

…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?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Have ‘/sitecore/content’ in your URLs? Time to fix it.


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

Monday, February 20, 2012

Right tool for the job


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.

Cannot login into Sitecore. [Friday Case]


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.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Coolest & quietest Sitecore module release ever!


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.