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

Flux Digital’s Adam Seabridge Awarded Sitecore Technical MVP 2019 Title

I received the awesome news this week that I’ve been awarded Sitecore Technical MVP for the 2nd year in a row. The MVP Awards are now in their 13th year and recognize the most active professionals in the Sitecore community with a proven passion for sharing for sharing their knowledge and expertise through active participation in online and offline Sitecore communities. I’m really happy to have received this accolade as there are only 315 worldwide and just 186 Technology MVPs  (less then in 2018). I’ve very much enjoyed being involved in the MVP Community for the past 12 months organising the Manchester SUG and getting additional insight, previews and input on things coming out of Sitecore HQ. Congrats to all the other 2019 MVPs. I’m looking forward to what the next year brings from Sitecore. Thanks to Tamas Varga for his continued support this year and the Rest of the Team at … Continue reading Flux Digital’s Adam Seabridge Awarded Sitecore Technical MVP 2019 Title

Creating Multiple Uniquely Named Solr Instances For Sitecore Development

Since the release of Sitecore 9.x and above Solr has been the default Search service and there is an requirement to install Solr with an SSL Certificate in order to use SIF to install Sitecore. To simplify this I’ve been using this Powershell Script that Jeremy Davis kindly created for a while now. In general it works brilliantly but if you want to keep all your Solr instances in C:\Solr as soon as I try to install a 2nd or 3rd instance of the same version of Solr (e.g a 2nd solr-6.6.2 instance for 9.02) I run into issues. The script assumes that you don’t already have a folder called “\solr-6.6.2” in C:\Solr and fails. It will also fail on a number of other steps such as the cert name, service name and zip download/extraction. Therefore I’ve modified the Script to support passing in a suffix which creates a unique instance of Solr using … Continue reading Creating Multiple Uniquely Named Solr Instances For Sitecore Development

Swapping & Deleting Renderings with Sitecore Powershell Extensions

I’ve been working a lot with SPE recently as have been working on a project where I needed to switch out a number of global components on all pages for new ones and update the data sources as well (e.g header / navigation etc). SPE was a great fit for this. There isn’t a Swap-Rendering method in SPE as such but there is the Set-Rendering function which I could use as a basis to do this. As I needed to update every page in the Site (well multiple Sites actually) I needed to write my script to update the page templates and swap out the standard values (so the changes would propagate to all pages using them). However I also wanted to make it work for page items too in case I wanted to update specific pages as well. Show Me The Script So after a lot of testing and trial and error … Continue reading Swapping & Deleting Renderings with Sitecore Powershell Extensions

Sitecore Telligent Community Integration

I’ve recently been working on Integrating Telligent Community with Sitecore using the ‘Telligent Community Sitecore SDK’ provided by Telligent. Before I started I managed to find one blog post on this on the whole of the internet…yep one. So I thought I’d write up a few things I learned in case anyone else finds themselves needing to do this. What is Telligent Community? In case you don’t know, Telligent Community is an .NET based Community platform which support Forums, Blogs, Media Galleries, Wikis etc and allows you to build Communities of users with Profiles and Connections, Messaging, Activity Steams etc. Before I started working with Sitecore full-time I worked with the Telligent Platform (or Community Server as it was called in the early days) for over 5 years, so know I’d like to think I know it pretty well. You can find out more about the integration options here: https://community.telligent.com/blog/b/product/posts/telligent-community-and-sitecore-integration I … Continue reading Sitecore Telligent Community Integration

Disabling private cache for Sitecore pages not working on Sitecore 8.1 and 8.2

A while ago I had an issue with Sitecore 8.1 update 2 where I was getting “Cache-Control: private” set from Sitecore, even when <setting name=”DisableBrowserCaching” /> is set to true.  I was also able to replicate this up to 8.2 update 5. Based on the docs here Sitecore is meant to return “Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store Pragma: no-cache” when DisableBrowserCaching is set to true. I raised this issue to Sitecore Support and they eventually confirmed they could replicate the issue. There wasn’t a fix for it yet though so I ended up implementing my own. The reference number from Sitecore for this issue is: #116813. I meant to blog about this a while ago but didn’t get round to it and then someone on Sitecore Stack Exchange had the same issue this week and it looks like there may still not be an official patch for it so I’ve put my code below to help … Continue reading Disabling private cache for Sitecore pages not working on Sitecore 8.1 and 8.2

Changing Sitecore Item Data Templates with SPE

This week I needed to change a number of navigation items from an old navigation item data template to a new one. I didn’t want to have to do this by hand as I have quite a few items to update, so I decided that Sitecore Powershell Extensions (SPE) was the quickest and easiest way to do this. If you don’t know about SPE I’ve written more about it here. There isn’t an function as such to do this in SPE so I put one together and thought I’d share it here. How do I use it? The function updates the data template of an item (and optionally it’s child items) from one template to another. It has 4 parameters: RootItemId – Specifies an Item Id to start searching for items from SourceTemplateId – Specifies the Id of the template to match items on (the template you wish to change) TargetTemplateId – … Continue reading Changing Sitecore Item Data Templates with SPE

Sitecore Symposium 2018 – Thoughts and Takeaways

I’ve just arrived back from Symposium 2018 in Orlando, Florida and thought I would share some of what I learnt with those who couldn’t make it this year. I’ve been to a previous Symposium in New Orleans but as I missed it last year due to moving house I was keen to attend again this year. This time around it is also my first as an MVP and is a great opportunity to learn more about the latest release of Sitecore and what’s planned for the future. I would be joining over 3000 attendees with 3 days of sessions on all things Sitecore. I arrived early evening for registration the day before and caught up with a couple of Sitecorians. The conference would start proper the following day. Day 1 Opening Keynote This year Symposium kicked off with an opening keynote by Paige O’Neill & Mark Frost. The theme this year is ‘elevate the … Continue reading Sitecore Symposium 2018 – Thoughts and Takeaways

Tips on Installing and Using the Sitecore Url Rewrite Module

Last week I had to implement some re-writes for some pages in Sitecore to make them more user and friendly and improve their SEO. This is a familiar requirement and I decided it was a good fit for the Sitecore Url Rewrite Module: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/Url_Rewrite.aspx. This module has been around for a long time and I’ve used it on a number of Sitecore projects but every time I have to install it and setup new rules I forget exactly how I did it last time. The documentation is a bit limited so I thought I’d explain how to implement a reasonably complex re-write rule, along with some tips on installing and debugging the module. Installing the Module You can download the Re-Write module for up to 8.1 update 3 from the Marketplace link above, however if you installing the module for Sitecore 8.2 (like me) you will need to go to Github and download … Continue reading Tips on Installing and Using the Sitecore Url Rewrite Module

Sitecore Update Package Timeout Issues

It’s been a little while since my last blog post as my Baby Daughter (Charlotte-Sienna) arrived 2 months ago which has made it a bit challenging to find time to write some. This seems to have happened to a bunch of Sitecore developers I know and it’s took me a while to get back to it. I don’t have a Sitecore T-Shirt for her yet so given the lack of pictures in this blog post here’s one of her in an England shirt from back at the World Cup. It didn’t help, we still lost…   Update Package Woes I recently had to upgrade a local Sitecore 8.2 update 6 instance to 8.2 update 7 using the Sitecore Update Installation Wizard and ran across a timeout issue which was as follows: ‘Sitecore.Shell.Upgrades.PostStep,Sitecore.Client’ Error executing post step (Sitecore.Shell.Upgrades.Bug118164PostStep): System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of … Continue reading Sitecore Update Package Timeout Issues