Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
This year, my talk at Sitecore Symposium was an introduction to deploying Solr for production use. It covered why you want SolrCloud, what you need to plan for it, and how you can go about installing it. Enough for a beginner to get from a blank Windows Server to running SolrCloud, and Sitecore configured to match.
If you missed my talk, or if you saw it and want to study it further, then you are in luck!
One of the interesting changes that's part of the coming release of Sitecore v9.3 is the integration of the Solr installation into the SIF scripts for developers. Given I've had a go at doing this myself in the past, I thought it would be interesting to look at their approach and see how it works...
A problem I've encountered a number of times in my Sitecore career is that when content trees are large and indexing tasks complex, it can take such a long time to perform a full rebuild of a search index that your web application can end up recycling for some reason before the build completes... Once content grows to this size, search can become quite difficult to manage, so I've been experimenting with a tool to help.
Having spent some time deploying instances of Java for Solr servers recently, I came across two things that wasted my time. So...
It's only a few weeks until Sitecore Symposium**1 kicks off for this year. My presentation is taking shape nicely (more of that later) but I've also been considering what I'll be watching from the rest of the conference... So if you're looking for inspiration, or still on the fence about buying yourself a ticket, here's what I'm looking forward to around this year's event:
Every so often pretty much every developer ends up in a situation where they're looking at a bug that manifests on one platform, but not on another. The sort of bug where you end up spending hours looking through log and config files for a subtle difference. I found myself looking into just this sort of bug recently, but on a site where (to my frustration) the config files were full of comments and whitespace differences across platforms that made diffing really hard ** . Spotting that subtle bug-causing difference is pretty much impossible when your diff is full of noise... So how can we fix that?
In theory, the magic of Dynamic Placeholders lets us have a container component placed onto your page more than once. That didn't work in the old world of "static" placeholders, because the rendering engine didn't like two placeholders with the same name. But despite it's benefits, the dynamic implementation has an annoying edge case – you may not be able to enable caching for your container component. I had a client bump into this issue recently, so I spent some time considering approaches that might help them address this issue.
I've been working on an international deployment of Sitecore recently, and resolving some problems around how publishing raises remote events has demonstrated that there are some things about the publishing process that I didn't entirely understand... I doubt this is a common scenario, but it still seems worth writing down what I've learned – So here's another crib sheet for my future self:
I love that lead to some fun... So I moved eagerly to Let's Encrypt when the tooling supported Windows reasonably well, and set myself up with a certificate with multiple SANs authenticated via their "HTTP proofs" mechanism, and it all worked fine, despite it being a bit of a pain that I had to expose port 80 for sites I only wanted accessible via port 443.
But I realised recently that they now offer wildcard certs that would make my life simpler, and that there is now decent support for DNS-based proof-of-ownership. So recently I tried moving my server over to this model – and there was a bit of friction. Entirely PEBCAK though – so I'm writing this down for the next time I forget how DNS works 😉
When I wrote my first blog post here
**
in February 2014 I
definitely
did not imagine still being at it 200 posts and five-and-a-bit years later. Originally I set myself a challenge of writing something once a week for a year, just to see if I could motivate myself to do it.
Honestly, I didn't really think I'd manage to keep it up for the entire twelve months, let alone still be here now – but somehow it's become part of my routine. I may have scaled down to a post every fortnight, as kids and other responsibilities took over more of my time, but the process of making myself notes about issues I encounter as I'm working, and then writing them up when I have free moments has become part of my working life now...
