Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to speak at the Sitecore Technical User Group in Manchester. I gave a talk about experiments into how you can put Sitecore into a NuGet package in order to create low-effort developer instances. Due to time constraints I wasn't able to get all of the information I wanted into the presentation, so over the course of my next three posts I plan to write up the key info from the presentation with that extra detail.
Quick one today, as I need to spend time writing up my presentation from the Sitecore Technical User Group in Manchester last week. (Hopefully will have something done for next week's post)
The other day a colleague remarked on how much time was wasted navigating down to the search index rebuild options in the Sitecore 6.6 Control Panel. While there are a variety of other ways of triggering a search rebuild, (Sitecore Rocks for example) it was suggested that having a button on the Ribbon (as per Sitecore 7) would be helpful in this case. So here's a quick set of instructions for one way it can be added:
If any of you have children, you're probably well aware of their awesome ability to spread around every new variation of the common cold that appears. This week I've been mostly suffering under the latest of these "presents" from my son, and to be honest may not be doing my sharpest ever thinking...
Coincidentally it took me a bit of head-scratching to resolve a problem with an experimental instance of Sitecore 6.6 that I wanted to make use of the other day. Browsing to the public site appeared fine, but when I tried to load Content Editor I was greeted with an exception saying
Access to the path 'C:\inetpub\wwwroot\TEST\Data\viewstate\1\7\E' is denied.:
While working on the
logging configuration for sending messages via email last week, I realised that all the documentation I could find for the
So with a bit of research, I've dug out the important values that can be used in case anyone else needs to configure log messages in older versions of Sitecore:
Sitecore manages its logging through the Log4Net framework. Out of the box, this is configured to write log data to disk files for you to review. But sometimes you might want to receive your log messages in different ways. Commonly people do stuff like change this to record messages in databases, but when I was asked how to get exception messages via email in Sitecore 6.6 recently, I failed to find any helpful posts.
So if you want to receive log messages via emails, here's one way of setting it up:
The idea that everything in your Sitecore content tree is "an item" is great once you understand how it works, but can be a bit confusing to people who are new to the software. It's a fairly common new-user mistake to set Layout Details on a Template item, rather than on the Standard Values item for the template. This leads to all sorts of "but why are my changes not visible on the website?" confusion.
I spent a while banging my head against an issue on a client's site last week. Having finally worked out the subtle misconfiguration of that was causing the bug, I thought I should write it down in case anyone else ever suffers the same problem. I figure if I write this down in enough detail, maybe the next person who suffers a related problem won't have to spend as much time Googling as I did...
Whenever you're making requests to a Sitecore instance, you're generating log data. Sitecore does include a scheduled tasks using the
Sitecore.Tasks.CleanupAgent
to remove old log entries. However what happens if you don't want to delete old logs? Recently I was talking to a developer who needed to keep them but also save disk space. So I hacked up a quick example of one way you might schedule zipping the logs through Sitecore. (rather than via the Windows scheduler or some other route) I'm reproducing it here in case it's of use to anyone else.
After looking at the navigation for sites with a single content tree in many language versions last week, this week we'll look at the other simple pattern for language navigation: When you have multiple trees of content with one language each and you need navigation links to let people swap between these content trees. This approach works best for websites where the structure of the content you need in each language differs significantly.
