Sitecore Media Library Performance Optimization Checklist

Here is a quick checklist that you can use in order to get more performance out of your Sitecore Media Library’s delivery.

Read more »

Search Index Troubleshooting

I have a rule of thumb. If I am being asked the same question twice a week, I am writing a blog post.
Today I have been asked the same question twice, so here you go.
I’ve blogged about search a lot, but one important thing still needs to be covered. Once you are convinced that going with the “new” search is the right way to go, you may have to deal with its configuration. On a two or more server environment, without proper configuration, the search index may not be rebuilt after publishing.

Read more »

Disable WebDAV in Sitecore

If you are not sure what WebDAV is, please refer to this document on Sitecore Developer Network.
Briefly, quoting this doc:

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.

Read more »

8 Reasons to Use New Search in Sitecore

Greetings,

Back in 2010 at the first Dreamcore conference, I was honored to present on two topics: ”Data Retrieval Techniques with Sitecore” and “Using Lucene.NET with Sitecore”.

If you have not seen any of those, download the slides and check them out. I consider myself being a data guy, so that’s why I really enjoyed presenting on these topics. Not sure why, but I love everything about data access, and absolutely adore what Microsoft did with Entity Framework 4, especially the oData stuff. There is something truly exciting in seeing your data flow and materialize in one shape or another.

Anyways, back to the topic. During my presentation on Lucene/Sitecore marriage, I was showing that Sitecore actually has two (!!!) implementation of Lucene.NET. One is a legacy, what we call “old” search. Everything within Sitecore.Data.Indexing namespace is considered to be “old” search. It is configured and implemented differently, though it uses the same Lucene.NET dll. There is also the “new” search which is represented by a few classes within Sitecore.Search namespace.

Read more »

Sitecore Product URLs Amazon Style

If you are a Sitecore CMS developer and you love shopping on Amazon, you probably had the same thought: what would it take to re-create Amazon.com in Sitecore? Completely from scratch. Ok, maybe it’s just me.

Read more »

Sitecore Searcher and Advanced Database Crawler

Hi there,
Today I am proud to announce a preview release of a component that extends the standard Sitecore Searching mechanisms, specifically, the relatively “new” Sitecore.Search namespace introduced in 6.0 and provides easy search querying APIs. If you are not sure what I am talking about, check out this recently published document on SDN and also Ivan’s blog posts about it.

Read more »

Approaching Language Fallback with Sitecore

Greetings,
Today I would like to present to you a prototype I have been working over past couple of weeks. This solution is built around a story about language fallback requirements of a fictitious multinational company. This is just an example of how you can approach similar requirement.
There is a number of alternative solutions that the Sitecore gurus from all over the world came up with, so you could naturally ask me: what is so special about this approach?

Read more »

Optimize Sitecore Performance Checklist

Greetings! I’ve stumbled upon this hot discussion on StackOverflow about Sitecore CMS performance and could help but sharing a few thoughts on the subject.
The message I am trying to convey is that the product is built for performance and scalability. After seeing a fair number of successful implementations that have the unlimited scaling capacity, it is sad for me to see some developers struggle.
We all love checklists, so here is a slightly modified list of things to look out for and try out when you start having performance degradation. Each case is special, so apologies if most of this is not applicable to your situation.

Read more »

Sitecore Logging Part 4. Integration with Log4Net Dashboard.

In my older posts I was showing how to teach Sitecore CMS to log events into a SQL Server database, today it is time to reveal the last part of this blog series.
Having everything in SQL is great, and it already enables you run queries, but wouldn’t it better to have some sort of a visual dashboard showing you all new events, highlighted by severity and type, and also let you filter those?

Read more »

Sitecore Logging Part 3. Adding custom parameters to the log.

Summer…I am on a blog posting spree :-)

This is a continuation of the sage about SQL logging for Sitecore CMS. As I previously blogged, you can easily have Sitecore log to a SQL database instead of a flat text file.
Now what if we take it one step forward and have Sitecore output more information than we had before, including Sitecore Context User, Sitecore Context Item Id and raw server URL?
Well, after some digging, here is the solution for you.

Read more »

Sitecore Logging Part 2. Dealing with the Exceptions

As as follow up to the initial post about SQL based logging in Sitecore, here is another quick tip about how to include exception stack trace into your log database.

Read more »

Sitecore Logging. Quick update.

Remember in the last post about SQL based logging I mentioned that there is an internal buffer that log4net has before it dumps all into the database.
While it seems to be quite useful when running in production, in development environment you would want to see immediate messages in the logs, especially when troubleshooting.
In order to do that, simply add the “bufferSize” section for your ADONetAppender and set the value to “1”:

<appender name="ADONetAppender_SqlServer" type="log4net.Appender.ADONetAppender" >
<bufferSize value="1" />

If the buffer is not explicitly set, it will be defaulted to 512 :-)

Happy logging!

File Download Dialog Box for Sitecore Media Item

It is not a secret that Sitecore CMS can deliver media content in a dynamic fashion.
You can do pretty sick things with our MediaRequestHandler (as an example of that, check out what Alistair Deneys done with it in the past).
Today, however, I wanted to cover a fairly easy aspect of this functionality.

Read more »

Hidden feature of Sitecore 6.2

Too many times I’ve seen this question, it is not even funny. My images are not showing up when I publish an item. While it can easily be explained from the technical perspective and addressed, it does not always make sense from user’s point of view.
Today I’ve learnt that Sitecore 6.2 actually introduced a small feature, an additional processor for the publishItem pipeline, intended to process related media items linked from the FileDropArea field, which was also another addition in 6.2.

Read more »

Sitecore Rendering Parameters – Friday Gotcha

One of the things I’ve learnt today is that Rendering Parameters is an extremely cool feature of Sitecore .NET CMS. It really empowers your editors by giving them ability to tweak parameters of your renderings in a very easy and intuitive way.

Read more »

Sitecore Rich Text Field - Iframe gotcha

If you ever tried putting an iframe in the Rich Text Field, you probably got what I got:

Server Error in '/' Application.
Empty strings are not allowed.
Parameter name: name

To solve this you have at least two options:
1. Wrap your iframe with the xsl:template definition. This way the iframe will appear as a web control in the rich text editor, but will render fine on the content delivery.

<xsl:template match="*" mode="main">
     <iframe id="iframe" src="..."></iframe>
</xsl:template>

2. Turn off HtmlEditor.SupportWebControls setting in web.config:

<setting name="HtmlEditor.SupportWebControls" value="false"/>

The second option makes more sense since you don’t need to alter the rich text content. If you don’t paste webcontrols to the rich text field, go for it.

Sitecore Friendly URLs and plus sign

One of the customers recently asked about using the plus sign in URLs, for example: http://localhost/news+events.aspx

There are at least two ways to accomplish this:
1. Allow “+” in item name via a configuration change
For this you will need to adjust the regular expression in the “ItemNameValidation” setting in web.config and make sure + sign is not  present in the “InvalidItemNameChars” setting.
2. Rely on the display name instead.

Read more »

Sitecore startup time - something that could improve it

One of the things any Sitecore developer had to deal with is startup time. There are tons of reasons why an application pool may restart (file change notification, config change, etc.) so this generally happens pretty often, especially on a development machine.
So I decided to spend some time on the problem and engaged our brilliant technical support into this little project.

Read more »

jQuery conflicts with PageEditor

There is such problem, indeed. It is caused by the conflict with Prototype.js that most of Page Editor, including designer and debugger uses. It can be simply worked around by overriding the $-function by calling "jQuery.noConflict()".

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery-1.2.6.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">

var $j = jQuery.noConflict();

      $j(document).ready(function() {

      });

</script>

More about that on the jQuery website.