SUCON 2017 – Day 1

I was lucky enough to attend Sitecore SUGCON 2017 in Amsterdam the week before last, which for those who don’t know is the annual Sitecore User Group Conference and is a must-attend event for every Sitecore developer. I was really looking forward to a number of the talks and meeting some of the Sitecore folks who I’ve got to know through the community. It was a packed two days so I thought I’d share my key takeaways from SUGCON for those who couldn’t attend, or if you had a few too many beers and forgot some of it 😊. As usual there were some session clashes so I couldn’t go to everything but I’m hoping I’ll be able to catch some of the other sessions when they are put online. SUGCON opened with Lars Nielsen taking to the Stage to talk about the future of Sitecore. He gave us some … Continue reading SUCON 2017 – Day 1

Bulk Move Items with Sitecore Powershell Extensions

Sitecore Powershell Extensions (or SPE) is a great Module for Sitecore that allows you to automate a lot of menial tasks, e.g bulk renaming, moving or deleting items and much more besides. There is a great Git book here with more info on what you can do with it: https://sitecorepowershell.gitbooks.io/sitecore-powershell-extensions/ I needed to move about 3,000 child-items to a sub-folder in Sitecore and since there is no easy way to do this I decided SPE would be perfect for the job. Before you do anything with SPE on a Production environment – a word of caution: please be very careful to test your scripts on a Development or Staging environment first and backup your live database before you run anything on Production. Ok now on with the code. The script below has two variables defined at the top. $rootOfitemsToMove – The folder/parent item where the child items you want to move currently exist. $destinationItem … Continue reading Bulk Move Items with Sitecore Powershell Extensions

Managing and Kicking idle users in Sitecore 8

Most Sitecore solutions have a limited number of Content Author logins available to use. If this isn’t managed carefully and the number of logged in users gets too high then new Content Authors trying to login won’t be able to and will instead by shown an error message :-(. Why does this happen? This message is shown because too many Content Authors are logged in at once, usually because: They are logged in to Sitecore and are holding an session open even though they are not actively using Sitecore. There are too many users trying to carry out Content Authoring at any one time. What options do users have if this happens? Kick-em – Content Authors can kick other users * by accessing this page, selecting a user and clicking ‘Kick off user’:<sitecoreurl>/sitecore/client/Applications/LicenseOptions/KickUser.aspx*Bear in mind that by default non-admin Content Authors are not able to do this so you must add … Continue reading Managing and Kicking idle users in Sitecore 8

Hiding unneeded Components to speed up Sitecore Experience Editor

Sitecore Experience Editor is very powerful but if you have lots of components on a page it can be slow to load sometimes. Because of this as a Sitecore developer you often find yourself looking at what you can do to speed it up. The first steps are usually to ensure you are following the recommendations in Sitecores Performance Tuning Guide. Also in more recent versions of Sitecore such as Sitecore 8.2 there are improvements in the performance of Experience Editor by Lazy Loading components in the Ribbon and so on – so if upgrading in the immediate future is an option this is recommended. If it isn’t and you are stuck on Sitecore 8.1 then also look at the following potential improvements: Disabling the My Items count (there is also a Support Hotfix for this now) and turning off the Suggested Tests count. What else can I do to speed up Experience Editor? So as the … Continue reading Hiding unneeded Components to speed up Sitecore Experience Editor

Simple Sitecore Content Synchronisation with Sitecore Content Migrator

As a Sitecore developer you often find you need to keep Dev and Staging environments up-to-date with Production in order to aid in development and in support and maintenance – otherwise it is very hard to successfully develop and test new features or replicate an issue from Production locally. This used to mean manually backing up and restoring databases or creating Sitecore Packages to pull content down. This process is a labour intensive and error prone as well as a pretty daunting task :-(. Sitecore Content Migrator to the rescue Thankfully Jeff Darchuk created Sitecore Content Migrator back in October to do just this for you. Sitecore Content Migrator is a free tool for Sitecore Sidekick which allows you to quickly and easily sync content down from one environment to another. It’s pretty simple to install and setup and then can be used whenever you want to carry out a sync. It … Continue reading Simple Sitecore Content Synchronisation with Sitecore Content Migrator

Simple Markdown Support In Sitecore

Markdown is a really lightweight way to support simple HTML formatting, such as bold or italic without using a Rich Text editor. It’s often used in ReadMe files and sites like Stack Overflow. This post describes how we can also use it with Sitecore with just a few lines of code, you can read more about Markdown on the John Grubers blog. What is markdown and why would I want to us it? So why might you want to add support for simple formatting to plain text fields in Sitecore?. You might want to do this because you have a text field which you don’t want content editors to be able to use full rich text editing with, but you want to give them a bit more control over the styling. You might also do this the make it quicker and simpler for content editors. In the example I’m going to explain here … Continue reading Simple Markdown Support In Sitecore

Sitecore Stack Exchange Site Needs Your Help!

A while ago Mark Cassidy  started a Stack Exchange Site for Sitecore – our own Sitecore Specific Stack Overflow essentially .  Great idea right? Myself and other Sitecore Community members have been trying to get the site (currently in Beta) to launch. Due to Sitecore Symposium causing a downturn in activity for over a week we were initially told the site wasn’t going to make it out of Beta :-(. However the good news yesterday was that Stack Exchange kindly relented and extended the Beta for another two weeks! until the 18/10: http://meta.sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/60/extending-the-private-beta-to-10-18 However if this is going to succeed we need more Sitecore developers / users to get involved. There are many of you out there but not enough on the Stack Exchange site. If you have already signed up for Area51 then please use the site and start contributing.  Go to: https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101710/sitecore and then use the “Visit” link under the … Continue reading Sitecore Stack Exchange Site Needs Your Help!

Sitecore Symposium 2016 – Day 1

Sitecore Symposium is an 2 day Conference for Sitecore Users, Developers, Partners, MVPs and just about anyone else who works with Sitecore. This year it was in New Orleans and I was lucky enough to be able to come out for a few extra days to Explore NOLA and I can highly recommend it, a great city with some insanely good food, interesting history and friendly people. Day 1 On day One I was to learn a lot about the improvements and new features in Sitecore 8.2 including SXA, Sitecore Azure, Path Analyser and much more. Opening Sessions The opening session was kicked off in New Orleans style with an big Jazz band which certainly woke me up after the early start. Interesting it was comedian Jake Johannsen who opened up and got us all in the mood before handing over to Micheal to kick off the first keynote. Micheal talked … Continue reading Sitecore Symposium 2016 – Day 1

My thoughts on SUGCON 2016 – Day 2

There was an early start for Day 2 (especially after a late-ish night involving a few strong Danish Beers), but I knew there were some intriguing talks today so didn’t want to miss anything. You can read about Day 1 here if you missed it. The first session that caught my interest was Nick Wesselmans talk on how Active Commerce use SIM, Powershell, Octopus Deploy and Azure to automate product builds. Using SIM, Powershell, Octopus Deploy and Azure to automate product builds. Nick gave an overview of how they created a PowerShell wrapper for SIM to automate Sitecore instances for product builds for their Active Commerce product. He also talked about how they use Sitecore Power Shell Extensions (SPE) to do things like automate publishing, rebuild the links database and initialise Sitecore Zip package builds. I’ve experimented with SPE but I’ve not used it in anger and this has given … Continue reading My thoughts on SUGCON 2016 – Day 2

My thoughts on SUGCON 2016 – Day 1

I was lucky enough to arrive at my very first SUGCON a day early and see at bit of the Copenhagen. It’s beautiful, everyone is very friendly and the food and beer is impeccable, if you get chance to go then you definitely should.   Opening Keynote Day 1 of SUGCON kicked off on Monday afternoon with an opening Keynote from Lars Nielsen (Sitecore Co-Founder & Chief Development Officer). This was to prove one of the most intriguing presentations of the conference as Lars revealed a number of new features coming in Sitecore 8.2. One bug-bear for a lot of Sitecore clients is the upgrade process, Lars assured us that in 8.2 (using the Express Migration Tool) this is going to be much easier and won’t involve upgrading in multiple steps (as is currently the case) and that is should be possible to move from 6.5 > 8.2 in one automated … Continue reading My thoughts on SUGCON 2016 – Day 1