An Sitecore Multilist field with an External Datasource

This week I needed to create an Multilist which required a DataSource that doesn’t reside in Sitecore. I’ve done this a few times before but using an DataSource for a Multilist from outside of Sitecore isn’t something I have needed to do often. There aren’t many articles on how to do this, so I thought I’d write up how to do this using Sitecore 9 (it should work with Sitecore 8 and below too). I’ve based the implementation on the code from this post by Benjamin Vangansewinkel: http://sitecoreblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-create-custom-multilist-field.html. So Kudos to Benjamin for writing this back in 2012. The are alternatives to this approach such as using creating a custom token or a custom data provider but I feel a custom Multilist is simpler and easier to manage. Benjamin’s post is really useful, but some of the code is missing and I needed to show a count of the items available and selected in my … Continue reading An Sitecore Multilist field with an External Datasource

Sitecore SUGCON 2018

I’ve just come back from SUGCON 2018 in Berlin and I think it was the best one I’ve been to yet. It was my third time attending the Sitecore User Group Conference (a conference for the Sitecore Community organised by the Sitecore Community). This year I was lucky enough to be going as a first-time MVP and would be collecting my award during the conference. I arrived early to see a bit of Berlin on the Sunday and catch up with some friends, colleagues and other Sitecore Devs and MVPs and before I knew it it was time for SUGCON to start. It kicked off with some fancy lights and music and Peter Brinkman with the opening Keynote explaining how large SUGCON has grown since it started in 2016, there were 600 attendees this year!. There was a lot to take in over the 1.5 days so before I forget … Continue reading Sitecore SUGCON 2018

My Sitecore MVP 2018 Journey So Far

Back in late January I was fortunate enough to be awarded Sitecore Technology MVP 2018. For anyone in the Sitecore Community this is a great privilege as there are only 208 Technology MVP’s worldwide and 20 in the UK. I hadn’t got round to writing on my Blog about it at the time so I thought it would be good to talk about my experience so far this year as an MVP and also what my plans are for this year. Every year, the Sitecore MVP Awards honour individuals with a passion for sharing their knowledge and expertise through active participation in online and offline Sitecore communities. Sitecore has an fantastic community of developers who really try and help one another out both online and offline and share their knowledge and expertise whenever they can. If you want to see the full list of Sitecore MVPs for 2018 you can … Continue reading My Sitecore MVP 2018 Journey So Far

Getting Started with Sitecore JSS

I saw a demo of JSS at SUGCON last year by Alex Shyba and it looked really cool. Ever since I’ve been keen to try it out as soon as I could. This post covers the basics of setting up JSS and running a demo React App. The first stumbling block however was getting an install of Sitecore 9 up and running. You will need this before you can proceed with the rest of this tutorial so if you don’t have Sitecore 9 installed already then you can read my Blog Post on how to install Sitecore 9 update 1 here. What is JSS? JSS is an SDK that allows developers to build websites using Javascript frameworks such as React and Angular. Sitecore is used as a Headless CMS to provide the Sitecore item’s presentation details as JSON. It has full support for the Sitecore Experience Platform, including Experience Editor, Personalization, MV testing … Continue reading Getting Started with Sitecore JSS

Install Sitecore 9 Update 1 – in 4 Simple Steps

By now you probably know installing Sitecore 9 is a bit different to previous versions and instead of using an installer the process involves using The Sitecore Install Framework (or SIF) to install Sitecore. When Sitecore 9 first came out I made numerous attempts to install it on my Windows 8.1 machine and couldn’t get it to work due to an issue with SSL certs for xConnect. Apparently it’s possible to get working but I couldn’t get past the issue so decided I’d upgrade to Windows 10 instead. Sitecore 9 Update-1 came out earlier this week and after upgrading to Windows 10 over the Christmas break I decided it was time to have another go. I’ve kept a close eye on the Community tools and blog posts for helping with installing Sitecore 9 over the past two months and think the approach I have outlined below is pretty quick and fairly simple. Prerequisites First up … Continue reading Install Sitecore 9 Update 1 – in 4 Simple Steps

Manchester Sitecore Technical User Group Presentation

Last Wednesday I was kindly invited by Jitendra Soni  & Martin Davies  to Talk at the Manchester Sitecore Technical User group. After some deliberation I decided I would do a Talk on using Jeff Darchuk’s Content Migrator module for Auto-syncing content and show the customisations we implemented for this to sync content on a specific day of the week and build a UI for setting up the configuration of Content Migrator for Automated Syncs. Jitendra presented first and talked about the new features in Sitecore 9, whilst I’ve read quite a bit about Sitecore 9 It was good to see some of these in more detail and be able to ask questions. I enjoyed giving my first presentation at a Sitecore technical user group, everyone seemed to be engaged in the talks and it was great to see so many Sitecore developers at the Manchester Meet-up. For those who have asked … Continue reading Manchester Sitecore Technical User Group Presentation

Auto-Setting Alt Text For Existing & New Images in Sitecore with Cognitive Services

Alt text on images is important for accessibility but often content editors do not set it or are not sure what to set it to. I recently had the scenario where a client had thousands of existing images (across a Multisite Solution) with no Alt text entered and was asked to find a solution to add these retrospectively and also to make this easier going forward. The Robots Are Coming After considering my options (and reading a bunch of Blog Posts on how others have solved this) I decided to use Sitecore Powershell to set the missing Alt tags. This was because I only needed to run this once and then I won’t need to do this again. However what should I set the Alt text too? It would be possible to use the image name in Sitecore or other attributes on the image in Sitecore to intelligently name the … Continue reading Auto-Setting Alt Text For Existing & New Images in Sitecore with Cognitive Services

Upgrading Sitecore Content Migrator & Scheduling Content Syncs

Back in February I wrote about using Sitecore Content Migrator to Sync Content to your Dev and Staging Environments from Production. Since then Jeff Darchuk has released a number of versions and in 3.1 on-wards it now support  Scheduling Content Syncs :-). This is great as it means you will no longer have to do this manually – this can take a lot of time if you have a few Sites and environments to sync. If your not already using Content Migrator yet then you can just go ahead and install 3.2* from the VS Package Manager Console like so: Install-Package SitecoreSidekickContentMigrator -Version 1.3.2 However if you have an older version installed (like me) you will need to upgrade first. I didn’t find the steps after upgrading very clear, so I’ve documented this for anyone else who needs to do this. * Note: you can install 4.0 rc2 instead, this is pretty stable … Continue reading Upgrading Sitecore Content Migrator & Scheduling Content Syncs

Auto-maintaining Sitecore Session State permissions in tempDB after SQL Server restarts

We use SQL Server to maintain our Sitecore sessions which mostly works fine. However as part of the performance boosts recommended by Sitecore the session-state is moved to store session in SQL Server tempDB. The process is explained here: https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/setting_up_and_maintaining/session_state/session_state/walkthrough_configure_a_shared_session_state_database_using_the_sql_server_provider However, every time that SQL Server is restarted, it recreates tempDB and resets the access rights for users and the session tables. This will result in your Sitecore site going down and an error such as: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: The SELECT permission was denied on the object ‘SessionState’, database ‘tempdb’, schema ‘dbo’. The INSERT permission was denied on the object ‘SessionState’, database ‘tempdb’, schema ‘dbo’. The UPDATE permission was denied on the object ‘SessionState’, database ‘tempdb’, schema ‘dbo’. And also an angry client and customers :-(. How do I solve this? You could re-run the script from the Performance boost download provided by Sitecore (Sessions db performance boost.sql ) but this could happen late … Continue reading Auto-maintaining Sitecore Session State permissions in tempDB after SQL Server restarts

SUCON 2017 – Day 2

I missed a couple of the morning sessions on Day 2 so I’m hoping that some of them will make it online, from what I hear the Publishing Service 2.0 presentation by Stephen Pope was very good. If you missed it you can read about Day 1 here. Tooling For Helix with a Docker focus The first talk I went to was from some of the guys at Pentia (Thomas Stern & Emil Klein) on using Docker and Yoman to generate a Helix based Sitecore site. The tool they have built looks really cool, it takes a project name, folder and .NET version and creates a Sitecore site for you within a Docker container within a few minutes. This includes installing the .NET Framework, the Site files and setting up IIS. They have also created similar tools for setting up Mongo and Solr within Docker. The link above is hard to … Continue reading SUCON 2017 – Day 2