On the sixth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me:

Six Keystone config tips,
Five Golden Rules!
Four CI tools,
Three powershell scripts,
Two Keystone merge tips,
…and a placeholder rule in the content tree.

There are a lot of configurations that come with the Keystone for Sitecore development accelerator, but here are six that you may not know about!

1. Display your name in the browser title

You’ll find this one in the content tree at /sitecore/content/Global Configurations/Messaging/Labels/C/CompanyName. This value is automatically appended to the browser title value so that you can have browser titles such as “About Us – Acme”. In this example, “About Us” is the current page title, where “Acme” is the CompanyName value that has been set. You can override this at each site configuration level to have different behaviour for each site!

2. Token expiration

The Forgot/Reset Password components rely on security tokens to make sure that any links sent to users expire after a specified amount of time. You can configure this expiry with the Keystone.Security.Tokens.DefaultExpiryHours setting in the Keystone.All.Security.config patch file.

3. Preview Site search indexes

The Keystone site search component can be configured to use indexes, but often you want to test this out against the data in the authoring server when using Preview mode. You can use the SiteSearch.PreviewIndexName setting in the Keystone.All.SiteSearch.Settings.config file to specify the name of the index to use when previewing site search functionality.

4. Component publishing logging

Keystone has a form of ‘bundled’ workflow which pushes components through their own workflow when their associated page is approved. Sometimes, you want to debug what’s happening in the log and sometimes you don’t. For that reason, there is the EnableComponentPublishLogging setting in the Keystone.CA.PublishRelatedMedia.config file.

5. Missing datasource message

Almost every Keystone component will display the shared view Views\Shared\DatasourceMissing.cshtml if a datasource is expected but not found. However, the contents displayed in that view can be edited in the Sitecore tree using the configuration item: /sitecore/content/Global Configurations/Messaging/SitecoreContentAuthorInterface/DataSourceMissingError. You can also override at the site level to provide site-specific messaging!

6. Extranet domain

The Keystone login component is tied to a domain so that users only have to enter their username when logging in. But which domain? Into the tree we go again for this configuration item: /sitecore/content/Global Configurations/Settings/SystemConfiguration/ExtranetLogin/LoginDomain.

As with the others, you can override this at the site level to have different domains for different site Login components.