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Reviewing a recently installed Sitecore 9.1.0 instance I found thousands of errors in the logs ERROR Path Analyzer Error during aggregation. and ERROR Path Analyzer Cannot apply rule on the interaction . Full stack traces :- I could find nothing online but this method Sitecore.PathAnalyzer.Rules.MapConditions.InteractionSiteNameCondition.Compare led me to the SiteNames table in the…

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This week the Cardiff Sitecore User Group took place and was kindly hosted and sponsored by Confused.com . There was a great lineup of speakers with Ehab El-Gindy , Senior Software Engineer from Sitecore, Martin Davies , Sitecore MVP from Kagool and myself presenting. Helix the Important Bits Big Ball of Mud Ehab-El-Gindy The talks by myself and Martin were recorded My slides are also…

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Jonathan Robbins and I presented at the Sitecore User Group Conference Europe 2018 / SUGCON 2018 this year in Berlin at the hosted at the Estrel Berlin. Our slides from the talk can be found from the talk here , the talk was also recorded. We had a great time presenting and the conference was superbly organised a huge credit to everyone involved. 

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  The Sitecore Most Valuable Professional (MVP) awards for 2018 have been announced and I am thrilled to be amongst the list of Sitecore Most Valuable Professionals for 2018 having been awarded the Sitecore Most Valuable Professional Technology Award . Being one of the 208 Technology MVPs recognised this year makes it three years in a row I have been recognised as a Technology MVP by Sitecore…

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Having issues loading Experience Profile data in Sitecore Experience Platform 9.0 rev. 171002 (9.0 Initial Release)? You may be seeing these issues.. When loading the Experience Profile for the first time if you have some data you would expect it to load. In the screen shot below the search results were showing 3 but there was no data in the table. Opening up Chromes dev tools you can see there…

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Since Sitecore 9 was released a few weeks back , I ’ ve been digging into the new release and there are lots of new things to play with. One of the most interesting new features is xConnect, a framework of rich APIs and services that allows users to integrate customer interaction data collected by Sitecore with customer data from nearly any third-party system or channel. xConnect brings with it a…

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I was looking for a way to automatically generate Glass Models for my Sitecore Templates that had been serialized using Unicorn ’ s Rainbow YAML serialization formatter and came across this post  by Sitecore MVP  Robin Hermanussen   –   http://hermanussen.eu/sitecore/wordpress/2015/04/generating-sitecore-code-without-tds After reading the documents on GitHub  it sounded perfect so I forked the…

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Last year I wrote two posts about Continuous Delivery with Sitecore Continuous Delivery with Sitecore Part 1  and  Continuous Delivery with Sitecore Part 2 Since then I ’ ve tweaked the deployment process and made significant changes to the solution being deployed, we refactored to be more inline with Sitecore ’ s Helix standards, I gave a talk about this at the Sitecore User Group in Cardiff…

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I am a bit (a lot) late to the Sitecore Azure PaaS party, Sitecore has supported deployments to Azure using Web Apps since  Sitecore XP 8.2 Update-1 (rev. 161115) but have been playing around with the Quick Start templates provided by Sitecore  https://github.com/Sitecore/Sitecore-Azure-Quickstart-Templates. I wanted to get up and running an XP0 instance of 8.2.5 so jumped to the repo  –   https…

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Jonathan Robbins ( @ISlayTitans ) and I spoke at the   Cardiff Sitecore Technical User Group – August 2017. The talk was titled   A developer always pays his tech debts and we discussed going from legacy to a Helix compliant solution, slides are now available .       Thanks to Sequence   for hosting the User Group and   CPS Group   for providing the food. Some photos from the User Group are…

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Sitecore recently announced their MVP award ’ s for 2017  and I have again been awarded the  Sitecore Most Valuable Professional Technologist Award,  one of only 215 Technologist awarded  worldwide. This year, Sitecore has designated 215 Technology MVPs, 39 Digital Strategist MVPs, 18 Commerce MVPs, and 10 Cloud MVPs representing 29 countries and more than 140 companies. Now it its eleventh year…

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I had a requirement to implement sequentially numbered WFFM form submissions to identify submissions, email address would not do as we anticipated multiple applications per email. Nothing out of the box supported this requirement so I created my own. Nikola ’ s  blog post https://sitecorecorner.com/2015/06/30/wffm-session-aware-single-line-text-field/   pointed me in the right direction. My…

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Following on from my posts  Continuous Delivery with Sitecore Part 1 – TeamCity Setup  and  Continuous Delivery with Sitecore Part 2 – Octopus Deploy Setup , I ’ ve added another step to achieve Semantic Versioning (SemVer)  in my deployment pipeline, as we are already using GitFlow   for branching we only had some configuration changes to make. I ’ ve added  GitVersion  to our release process…

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If you are running Sitecore 8 Update 5 or less then you are likely running MongoDB 2.6 as the compatibility table states this is the only supported version since Sitecore XP 7.5. However there are issues with  MongoDB 2.6 and Sitecore XP 7.5 and 8.0 that can lead to performance problems   Using this version of the Mongo C# driver may cause excessive connections being open to the xDB database…

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The Problem An application is using excessive amounts of memory causing slow response times and application pool recycles.   Reproducing the issue Generate some load for your application locally, I used JMeter ,  Martina Welander  has an excellent post on setting it up –   https://mhwelander.net/2014/07/25/generating-sample-sitecore-analytics-data-with-jmeter  to generate some sample traffic…

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When trying to add a new Save Action to a Web Forms for Marketers form and you get an alert telling you  This action cannot be added. Your configuration does not support it.     Or your Send Email Message actions disappear from the item.     You should also see this message in your log files for all forms with the Send Email Message action.   Make sure your MailServer settings are set…

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When using Octopus Deploy to deploy Sitecore solutions that are scaled i.e. have one or more Content Delivery or Content Management servers, there are configuration changes that need to be made for each role. For example a Content Delivery server does not require a connection string for the master database or setting out of process session state for Content Delivery servers. Config transforms are…

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Continuous Delivery with Sitecore Part 2 – Octopus Deploy Setup   In Part 2 I ’ ll walk through the Octopus Deploy  configuration where we use PowerShell, Sitecore.Ship and Curl to install the Team Development for Sitecore Packages and publish the changes, if you are looking for the TeamCity configuration see Part 1   Configure Octopus to be able to read the NuGet feed from TeamCity.   See…

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There have been many posts on this topic around the Sitecore community and I ’ ve used bits from a few different posts that I ’ ve added under the references heading  below . This post details the process I ’ ve used recently  for deployments with Sitecore, Team Deployment for Sitecore (TDS), Git, TeamCity, Octopus Deploy and Sitecore Ship. What is Continuous Delivery? Continuous Delivery is a…

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Sitecore recently   announced their MVP award ’ s for 2016, awarding 221 people MVP status across the community. These awards were broken down as follows.   I am absolutely honoured to be one of 18 Technology MVP ’ s in the UK and 177 worldwide. You can find the full list 2016 MVP ’ s here –   www.sitecore.net/mvp2016  and details of how to become an MVP yourself . Thanks to all at Sitecore for…

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The default configuration for Solr with Sitecore 8 will happily find and index all of the data in your fields using the dynamicFields defined in the schema file. Here is an example of a dynamic field configuration for a text field. Text fields are defined in the  Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.DefaultIndexConfiguration.config **file and Sitecore field types of ** “ html|rich text|single-line text…

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My current project built with Sitecore 8 update 3 is well in to the build phase and I was starting to look at how components are performing and adding caching where applicable. So I checked the stats.aspx admin page to make sure controls configured to be cached were being servered from the cache, yourhostname /sitecore/admin/stats.aspx , but my custom defined MVC site was not showing meaning I…

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Ever wanted to allow your editors to select multiple items in a Rules Engine Condition? You are in luck Sitecore has a TreeList Macro you can use. Too add it to a rule use the syntax below.   Which looks like this when you select it.   This will give the editor a TreeList control starting at the /sitecore/content level, but what if you want to filter the displayed items or the items that can be…

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My First Sitecore Marketplace Module has just been released! You can check it out here  Icon Selector Field . It allows content editors to select CSS font icons via a custom field that include a SPEAK UI Dialog for searching and selecting icons. The field also show a preview of the icon when it has been set in the CMS. If you are using Glass Mapper  the Module also includes an…

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Ran in to an interesting problem recently in my current project, we are using the publish/subscribe pattern in our JavaScript associated with the components we are building. Essentially its a design pattern to promote loose coupling and fits in well with Sitecore ’ s ability to provide highly modular applications you can read more about it here and here . The problem came when one component…

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When using Solr search provider in Sitecore 8 and also using the excellent Glass mapper for Sitecore the documentation on the Glass site walks you through creating a custom search result class with property attributes for search and glass here The ID property has the attribute [ IndexField("_id")] , this attribute does not work with Solr and should be replaced with   [ IndexField("_group")] A…

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Unable to remove message variant using Sitecore Email Campaign Manager when variant has been not created in default language. Steps to reproduce :- The page reloads but variant still exists, I had to create a version in the default language EN prior to deleting the selected variant. This issue was found using Sitecore with 7.1 and Email Campaign Manager 2.1 140214 it was confirmed as a bug via…

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Ran it to an Error message today flooding a Sitecore 7.1 instance log files with thousands of Unable to create document builder (). Please check your configuration. We will fallback to the default for now. Happily  this  post pointed me in the right direction but my solution was slightly different I needed to add line below to the \App_Config\Include\Sitecore.ContentSearch.Lucene…

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