Sitecore Horizon Features & Functionality – SUG Presentation

Back in March before everything changed in the World and the UK ground to a halt with the Coronavirus pandemic, we managed to squeeze in the first Manchester Sitecore user group of the year. I presented an overview of Sitecore Horizon Features & Functionality in Sitecore 9.3. I talked about what Horizon can do as well as some of it’s current limitations, how to install it and demoed editing an custom page I’d built in Sitecore MVC in Horizon. My talk seemed generally well received and there was quite a lot of discussion about various aspects of Horizon, some of which I’ve edited out to keep the presentation a reasonable length. One of the hot topics was around how existing MVC pages would work with it and surprisingly they mostly do (for field types that are supported at this point anyway). I think it was useful for others who haven’t yet … Continue reading Sitecore Horizon Features & Functionality – SUG Presentation

New UK Sitecore User Group Website

TLDR If you are looking for Manchester Sitecore User Group or London Sitecore User Group events please visit: https://scug.co.uk/ Why we are no longer using Meetup.com Meetup recently announced a change to their pricing policy for organising meetups and now want to charge each attendee $2 to RSVP for an event. Given that it’s unlikely that everyone will want to pay this to RSVP to SUGs a New UK Sitecore User Group Website has been created by Steve McGill and Johannes Zijlstra. We are no longer using Meetup.com anymore to advertising UK SUGs. The Manchester, London, Bristol and Cardiff Sitecore User Groups will all be using https://scug.co.uk/ to advertise SUGs going forwards.                 You can register for an event by clicking the Login link at the top of the page and login with either: Google, Facebook, GitHub, Microsoft, Twitter or LinkedIn. You can do so safely, we will not share your email address … Continue reading New UK Sitecore User Group Website

Installing Sitecore 9.3 And Horizon

TLDR Installing Sitecore Horizon involves first installing Sitecore 9.3 and then Installing Horizon as a separate module from here. Follow the Sitecore Horizon install instructions below. Sitecore 9.3 dropped yesterday and It ships with a number of updates to JSS, SXA, Sitecore MVC and Sitecore Forms and more. However the Mostly Highly anticipated part of this release is Horizon – Sitecore’s all new Page Editing interface (yes ‘Page Editor’ is back – but this time built with Node and much faster). Horizon also has Simulator Mode and Insights View which look pretty cool. For those of you keen to take a look at Horizon in more detail this blog post is going to give you an overview of how to install Sitecore 9.3 and Install Sitecore Horizon on a local development environment. Sitecore 9.3 Install In 9.2 Sitecore released a new simple installer called SIA (Sitecore Installer Assistant) and that is what … Continue reading Installing Sitecore 9.3 And Horizon

Fixing Standard Values without Affecting Existing Content

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend Sitecore Symposium this week so won’t be writing up an overview of what I’ve learned, there were some exciting things announced for Sitecore in 2020 though from what I’ve seen on Twitter so I’ll keep an eye out for those Symposium Blog posts for more info on what I missed. Instead this Blog Post is about an slightly odd situation regarding fixing Standard Values when they have been set incorrectly for a number of templates. Standard values provide initial values for all items based on a given data template. We had around 30 page data templates that have an field value set on the standard values to an incorrect value. Unfortunately there are thousands of items based on these templates and I needed to maintain the existing values so I couldn’t just change the standard values to the right ones as it would also re-set all … Continue reading Fixing Standard Values without Affecting Existing Content

Copying Final Renderings back to the Standard Values on Page Templates with SPE

Following on from my post last month where I’ve been trying to automate some of the tedious tasks involved when building pages and components in Sitecore, I had another task which I wanted to try and automate with SPE also. This time round it was automating copying Final Renderings back to the Page Template after adding lots of components to a page in Experience Editor. I have been building quite a few new Page Templates with between 10 and 20 components on each. I was using Experience Editor to build up the pages as it’s much quicker than using Content Editor. Once I’d finished the page I needed to ensure that all the renderings are copied back to the Page Template Standard Values Renderings field so that when Content Editors create a new page using the Template it has a default set of components. I could do this manually but is … Continue reading Copying Final Renderings back to the Standard Values on Page Templates with SPE

Accelerating Development of Sitecore Components with SPE

I’ve recently been creating a lot of new pages and component for the latest designs for the client I’m working with and and after creating a bunch of components I thought there must be an quicker and easier way to do this. TLDR: Use Sitecore Powershell Extensions to automate the process of creating Components in Sitecore Lets looks at some of the steps you commonly go through as a Sitecore Developer when creating components: Create the Component Data Template Pick an icon (we all know this takes the longest amount of time :-)) Create an Component Folder template item for the Components to be organised in Add Standard values and Insert options on the Folder template for the Component and Component folder Create test content organised into folders using the Component and Component Folder templates you’ve just created Create a View Rendering Add the View Path, Data Template and Data Source Location and … Continue reading Accelerating Development of Sitecore Components with SPE

The Business Case & Considerations for a Sitecore 9.2 Upgrade

I don’t often write Sitecore blog posts from a business perspective but I today I thought I would as I think some Sitecore customers are still on 8.x or 9.0 and are considering an upgrade to Sitecore 9.2. With Sitecore 9.3 likely to be released later this year and mainstream support for 8.2 and below running out in December now is a good time to consider upgrading. In this post I’m going to outline what the benefits of moving to 9.2 are and also the considerations you should make before embarking on an upgrade. What are Benefits / Features of Sitecore 9.2? This is usually one of the first questions that will be asked. I’m not going to keep this fairly high-level as there are many in-depth blog posts out there on Sitecore 9.1 & 9.2 features but the following should provide a succinct summary. Sitecore 9.1 & 9.2 bring … Continue reading The Business Case & Considerations for a Sitecore 9.2 Upgrade

Excluding Specific Fields from Unicorn Serialisation (Field Filter)

This week I had a situation where I needed to include some Sitecore Items in Unicorns Sync but exclude certain fields from those items.  In my case these were navigation items which had a link on them. I wanted to maintain the ids of the navigation item across environments but not the link – as it changes per environment. I’ve used Unicorn a lot in quite a few Sitecore projects but I’ve never had to do this before so I wasn’t sure if it was possible or not. It turns out it is, Unicorn has an feature called a ‘Field Filter’. I can’t work out exactly when this became available but it looks like since version 4.0 Unicorn supports config based filtering. Luckily we are on Unicorn 4.0.8 so we didn’t need to upgrade. How do you use it? Field filters are actually used in the <defaults> node in the Unicorn.config that is provided by … Continue reading Excluding Specific Fields from Unicorn Serialisation (Field Filter)

Azure Switch On Rebuild Bug – Index name not always updating on CD Servers

I have recently been assisting a client with moving their Sitecore 8.2 update 7 Site to Azure. As part of this we decided to use Azure search for our custom search indexes – available in 8.2 u7 and 9.0.2 and later . We ran into an issue when we enabled Switch On Rebuild as we found that on rebuild the index would sometimes return no results. This resulted in missing data on the pages powered by these custom indexes. TL;DR This is a bug with Azure Switch On Rebuild, you can request SC Hotfix-294596 from Sitecore Support. Why did this happen? I didn’t previously know this until I started investigating this further and asked on SSE but if you have Switch On Rebuild enabled then on rebuild of the index Sitecore creates a new index with a -secondary suffix and switches to that once the index has been rebuilt. It stores a … Continue reading Azure Switch On Rebuild Bug – Index name not always updating on CD Servers

SUGCON 2019 Key Takeaways

Last Thursday and Friday it was Sitecore’s European User Group Conference (SUGCON) in London attended by over 600 Sitecore enthusiasts. It’s an great opportunity to learn about the latest Sitecore innovations, get some new ideas and to catch-up with others in the Sitecore Community. As always it was a busy few days packed with lots of new information and the usual clashing sessions. In this post I’ve tried to summarise the key takeaways and thoughts from the sessions I attended. You should be able to view most of the sessions on YouTube once they are uploaded and you can download a PDF of most of the presentations here so I’ve not included tons of slides. Day 1 SUGCON Kicked Day 1 kicked off with Sitecore CEO Mark Frost welcoming everyone and then handing over to Donovan Brown from Microsoft to talk about DevOps. Donovan Brown – DevOps with Microsoft Azure Having recently … Continue reading SUGCON 2019 Key Takeaways