Tag: Sitecore
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Sitecore 8 Upgrades: ‘Cannot read configuration file because it exceeds the maximum file size’
A warning to others upgrading to Sitecore 8: you may run out of Web.config space! Recently, I’ve been spending my time working on upgrading a site to Sitecore 8 and I encountered the dreaded 250KB limitation for the Web.config file. For security reasons, IIS will throw the “Cannot read configuration file because it…
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Using TDS with Visual Studio Online build server
Recently I needed to get builds running in Visual Studio Online (VSO) that contained Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) projects. Since I cannot install the TDS software on the VSO build server, I needed another way to get these projects to compile with a VSO build definition. The following blog post has…
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TDS project compile error: .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 was not found
I was recently working on some deployments that leveraged Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) projects and began receiving the following error on the build server: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin\amd64\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets (990): .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 was not found. In order to target “.NETFramework,Version=v2.0”, .NET Framework v3.5 Service Pack 1 or later…
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Sitecore announces 2015 MVPs
I’ve been taking some time off the last few weeks and when I returned to work this week I was happy to see that Sitecore had announced the 2015 MVPS! I was also happy to see my name on the list for the second year in a row! You can…
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Using an authenticated preview in Sitecore
Do you secure some of your website content from unauthenticated users? If so, you probably noticed that the default Preview mode isn’t working for you. Since Sitecore’s preview mode executes as the anonymous user, your secured content becomes hidden from that user. As an author, you need to be able to see what…
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Styling WFFM required fields on submit
Sitecore’s Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) does many things well, but some of the required field styling is a little on the clunky side. For example, if a required field is not filled out by a user, on submit WFFM will display a validation summary at the top of the form with…
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Keystone for Sitecore: Extending template entities
The Keystone for Sitecore business layer provides generated template entities for each page and component template. These entities provide properties to access each field with a strongly-typed value, as well as properties for template identifiers, field identifiers, and field names. As you extend the Keystone templates and add new fields, you will…
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Sitecore MVC: Editable links wrapping text and images
In transitioning from Sitecore Web Forms sublayouts to Sitecore MVC renderings, there are some things that have to be done a little differently. In this post, we’ll examine the scenario of wanting to provide authors with the ability to edit text or an image inside of an editable link. Credit goes to @mhwelander…
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Sitecore MVP Summit 2014: Return of the Jedi
The week in Vegas culminated with the gathering of all the North American Sitecore MVPs for the 2014 MVP Summit. Starting off with a solid breakfast was a must for most of the group, especially those who had stayed out until the wee hours of the morning. If a coffee…
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Sitecore Symposium 2014 Day 3: The closing sessions
After a busy day of tracks on Day 2 followed by a late party at the club, Wednesday’s sessions seemed to be starting a little early for pretty much everybody. 🙂 My plan for Wednesday was to see a few key sessions and spend more time meeting folks at the booth, so…
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Sitecore Symposium 2014 Day 2
Day 2 of the SYMNA held much excitement as the keynotes and tracks kicked off with a bang (or at least with dancing). Michael Seifert delivered an excellent opening keynote to set the tone for the day (say “Experience” one more time) which entirely focused on learning the complete context…
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Sitecore Symposium 2014: Time to Keystone!
With just 8 hours of flights between myself and Vegas, the excitement was starting to build. Our team was coming out in full force this year to watch some great sessions, meet awesome people, and show off Keystone at our booth! After years of building up an accelerator internally to deliver our…
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A verdict on Sitecore Training and Certification
A colleague of mine, Jason Carter, who recently went through Sitecore training, offered some insights into the training on a recent post of his. I thought this particularly well-timed given my recent post on topics not covered during Sitecore training. Check it out: Sitecore Training and Certification Exam
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5 things Sitecore training won’t prepare you for
This past week I had the pleasure of pair programming with a new member of our team at nonlinear. I don’t say that sarcastically, as it actually was a lot of fun to bring another person into the fold, fresh off of Sitecore certification. It’s also been a while since…
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Clearer requirements through Sitecore prototyping
Recently, my colleagues and I were about to embark on a mission to gather requirements for an upcoming release. We had already worked with this particular client and therefore knew that they would have a solid understanding of their existing solution, if not the full capabilities of the Sitecore platform.…
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Using subfolders for Sitecore config files
Recently, I’ve been changing the organization method I’m using when architecting builds for my clients. Sitecore supports automatically patching in include files from subfolders of App_Config\Include, which allows for architecting project-specific overrides and environment-specific settings in a much cleaner manner. Kamruz Jaman just wrote a great post about this on Friday. The…
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Sitecore 7: Ensuring IQueryable ordering with string fields
I hadn’t had the chance to really play around with the indexing options in Sitecore 7 until this past week when I needed to build a listing page from an index and sort it by the page title. At first, I just couldn’t get it to work. The ordering never seemed…
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Sitecore tips for upgrading and development
The last week has been very busy around the office and we managed to get out some helpful tips for those of you working with Sitecore for the first time, as well as folks who may be considering a Sitecore upgrade for their current installation. Trying to get started with…
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Sitecore 7.1: CSRF form field is missing
During a review of a solution we were delivering on Sitecore 7.1 Update 2 (rev 140324), our Page Editor dialogs no longer allowed users to expand tree lists when adding components. On the server, the logs were showing a CSRF exception, specifically that a CSRF form field was missing. 6708 16:19:44…
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Sitecore publishing: what does it mean?
Over time, our team has realized that when we are speaking to a client about publishing in Sitecore, we may not all be talking about the same thing. There really are three “publish” contexts that a client may be referring to: workflow approval, web database publishing, and content delivery cache clearing. Trying…
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4 Tips for Optimizing Incremental Sitecore Content Publishing
For the past few years, I have not been a big fan of incremental publishing. In fact, I’ve often recommended if there was one publishing mode to never use, it was incremental publishing. I didn’t know all the facts, but the truth was that every time I tried to implement…
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Getting started with Agile ALM for Sitecore
Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to iteratively improve our own processes at nonlinear to deliver better Sitecore solutions and set our clients up for maintainable and sustainable ALM processes. Some of my posts on automated Sitecore deployments with TFS or TeamCity outlined some of the initial steps we…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Conditional sublayout logic
In a previous post, I discussed handling the continuous deployment of templates and layouts, but mentioned that you also need to worry about conditional business logic in your sublayouts. The primary issue is this: if the data model is constantly in flux and the system is in a state of…
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Sitecore 7.2: Related Item Publishing
A lot of new stuff dropped in Sitecore 7.2, so our team started taking a look at some of the bits that interested us most. I did a little bit of testing and review of the new related item publishing enhancements, and they are quite nice. Peek on over at…
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Making the case for Continuous Deployment
Over on the corporate blog, I’ve tried to make the case for executing continuous deployment for Sitecore solutions. In reality, the concepts apply to any web applications being developed, but the particulars of how you will accomplish it will depend on the technology platforms being used. I’d love to get…
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Sitecore 7: Unit Testing fake indexes with MSTest
I recently posted a prototype solution to our corporate blog showcasing unit testing against Sitecore 7 indexes. I have made a solution available for download to show you how to use MSTEST to execute unit tests against fake indexes in Sitecore 7, and also how to do this without a…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Templates and Sublayouts
If you have decided to move to a continuous deployment model with your Sitecore solution, you now have several hurdles that you need to overcome to get your solution from development into production without risking the stability of the user experience. One of these is the introduction of new ‘building…
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Sitecore 6.6: Custom error pages do not display when Sitecore database down
With some versions of Sitecore, there is a known issue where a 500 error will be shown if the connection to the Sitecore database is down. A Karbyn blog post details the confirmed versions and how to reproduce, as well as a potential fix via Sitecore support ticket 377391. We…
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Sitecore Technical MVP Award 2014!
A few months ago I submitted my candidacy for this year’s technical MVP awards and this month I was notified that I had been rewarded for my efforts in 2014! I am now officially a Sitecore Technology MVP. I have joined a small group of excellent folks from around the…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Video presentation from SVUG
I had planned on kicking off a short series on how to tackle the challenges of Sitecore Continuous Deployment, but after I had written my post the Sitecore Virtual User Group (SVUG) held an online Q&A presentation by Jason Bert on Continuous Integration & Deployment. The presentation is a great…
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Sitecore login performance slows down over time
On a recent project using Sitecore 6.6, we ran across a strange performance problem with logging in visitors to the site. As the day went along, the response time for logging in a visitor to the site would slow down. Combined with Windows Authentication being required, this meant that initial…
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Sitecore 7: Buckets scare me
This week, I returned back from a client site to join my colleagues in a planning workshop for Sitecore 7. Our group already has one client moving to Sitecore 7, and we’ll likely have several other Sitecore 7 projects coming down the pipe in the next year, which means we…
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Sitecore: Taking on the Top 10 Reasons to A/B test
The practice of A/B testing follows the Lean methodology of Build, Measure, and Learn (BML). By using tools capable of performing these tests, we can build a quick test, measure the interaction with the tests, and learn from the results gathered. This is fundamental to improving your content and your…
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TDS: Deploy failed – “This software is protected to provide copy protection”
Have you encountered a failure while executing an automated Sitecore deployment with TDS where the type initializer throws an exception and you are asked to reinstall the TDS application? Apparently, if your TDS installation becomes corrupted somehow, you need to get rid of the web service and let TDS reinstall…
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Sitecore: Publishing stuck on Initializing after applying Scalability settings
I recently came across this issue after applying some scalability settings, and couldn’t initially figure out why the publishing was no longer working. Accessing the Desktop and using site publishing would display the dialog, but would hang on the Initializing… stage. After some preliminary investigation, it turned out that the issue…
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Configuring a Sitecore Preview Site for Anonymous Users
In some situations, there is a requirement to be able to preview unpublished content without logging into Sitecore. Perhaps a marketing director needs to review the page before it launches, or maybe a partner needs to review a press release prior to the official publish. The traditional Sitecore preview capability…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Five: The Move to a CMS
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, decided on some metrics, and refactored the website applications. Most recently, the team has tackled…
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Sitecore 6.6: Unable to find an embedded skin with the name ‘Telerik’
I’ve been going through the process of getting a project setup on my machine that has recently been upgraded from Sitecore 6.5 to Sitecore 6.6. Mostly things have been uneventful, but then I tried to load the Content Editor. I encountered the following error caused by the Telerik controls: Telerik.Web.UI.RadToolTipManager…
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Sitecore 7: Available for download!
It’s official, the new 7.0 is out there! You can download it off of the Sitecore Developer Network at: http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/Sitecore%20V5/Sitecore%20CMS%207.aspx Coinciding with the release have been a blast of emails, twitter posts, and blog posts, including the following series from my colleagues: Sitecore 7: Upgrade considerations Sitecore 7: What’s new for…
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Performance tuning your Sitecore installation
I’ll be continuing the Baby Steps to SOA topic next week, but for this week I’m jumping back into the world of Sitecore. I’ve just spent the past few weeks performance tuning another project, and there are so many rabbit-holes one has to jump down to find the culprit of…
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Sitecore 7: Content scalability and other exciting things
The company I work for has several Sitecore MVPs on staff who recently received an early preview of Sitecore 7. The preview stirred up some excitement within the team, and yielded a great post by Amanda Shiga highlighting three reasons to be excited about the upcoming Sitecore 7 release. There…
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TDS: So you’re deploying Sitecore to a new environment…
If you’ve been using TDS to do automated deployments for Sitecore, you’ll eventually need to start deploying to a new environment. Maybe you’ve set up your local environment, and now you want to get that process working in a daily build environment. Maybe you want to automate deployment to a…
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Applying Parameter Templates to the Sitecore Sublayouts
I recently got into a discussion on LinkedIn on how to let the Sitecore authors style their pages more easily, and it seems like folks out there are still a little confused on how to use parameter templates for your sublayouts. I guess the first thing that everybody should know…
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Automating Sitecore Deployments with TFS and TDS
During development, your team makes a lot of changes to fields, templates, presentation details, and various other elements that need to be tracked, verified, and deployed. You need a way to source control those database changes, and then make them available to your team to test. Here’s how to accomplish…
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Automating Sitecore Deployments with TeamCity and TDS
During development, your team makes a lot of changes to fields, templates, presentation details, and various other elements that need to be tracked, verified, and deployed. You need a way to source control those database changes, and then make them available to your team to test. Here’s how to accomplish…
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Source-controlling Sitecore: TDS Project Configuration Basics
Your Sitecore content changes are just as important as the code you are writing for your solution, and that means you should be tracking those changes in source control. Your team will be making a lot of changes to fields, templates, presentation details, and various other elements for which you…
St-Cyr Thoughts 