Latest articles

  • Continuous Everything: The Art of Repetition

    Continuous Everything: The Art of Repetition

    It is very fashionable to apply a single word to pretty much ANYTHING to try to get in on the latest trend. The current ‘Whatever-Ops’ trend (MarketingOps, ChatOps, OpsOps) is one such example. For a while, though, we’ve been having the word ‘Continuous’ thrown in front of a whole lot of activities in the software… Read more

  • TeamCity FTP plugin 501 error: Cannot accept argument

    TeamCity FTP plugin 501 error: Cannot accept argument

    While investigating options for deploying Sitecore to Azure, I found a TeamCity deploy plugin that supported FTP (among other things). Unfortunately, after trying to get it up and running I ran into the following 501 error while using FTPES (explicit FTPS): “Failed to upload artifacts via FTP. Reply was: 501 server cannot accept argument” Investigating… Read more

  • TDS Custom Post Deploy Actions

    TDS Custom Post Deploy Actions

    With the release of TDS 5.5, deployments now support post-deploy actions with a few out of the box options. However, you can even add your own custom actions into the flow. With a little help from Hedgehog Sitecore MVP Sean Holmesby (Thanks Sean!), I was able to get this working using the following six easy… Read more

  • Patch delete Sitecore elements based on element content

    Patch delete Sitecore elements based on element content

    Recently, I wrote about patching Sitecore instances for specific roles. During my research on how to do this, I was able to use a manner of Sitecore patching I had not previously known about. With a patch:instead, instead of targeting an attribute of the element you can actually target the contents of that element. (Thanks to @jammykam… Read more

  • Sitecore DevOps: Deploying instance role configurations with solution

    Sitecore DevOps: Deploying instance role configurations with solution

    Those of you who have installed Sitecore in a scaled environment (i.e. multiple instances) know that the process can be somewhat tedious. To configure an instance to use a specific role, you need to manually enable/disable/modify config files to make the instance act as a delivery, authoring, or processing instance. Oh, do you also want to upgrade… Read more

  • Sitecore announces 2016 MVPs

    Sitecore announces 2016 MVPs

    It’s that time of year again: Sitecore has announced the 2016 MVPS! I was again honoured to see my name on the list for the third year in a row. You can see the full list of 2016 MVPs on the Sitecore MVP site. My outward reaction when reading the email may have been calm and professional, but inside… Read more