Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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.
I was going to stop at three posts on simple patterns for navigation (Parts one,two and three are here) – but earlier this week I realised I'd not covered an important topic in navigation for Sitecore-based websites: How you can navigate between different language versions of your sites and pages. So this week, I'll start looking at language navigation.
There are two common patterns for how you might structure your content in Sitecore if you have a multi-lingual site. Depending on what sort of content you're dealing with, you might choose to:
(Technically, there's also a third option, where you have multiple content trees which may also have multiple languages – but that's just a combination of the two ideas I'll present)
The core navigation controls for these sites work in exactly the same way as the ideas I've presented in previous posts. But if you have multiple languages, then you need some code to display links to let the users swap between languages. And you need slightly different code for these two scenarios. So this week I'll look at the first of these:
I'm very pleased to be able to announce that Sitecore have invited me to be part of their MVP community for 2015.
Continuing the theme of simple approaches to navigation components, this week I want to look at a slightly more complex scenario for the top level navigation in a site. Sometimes you need the mark-up for primary navigation to vary between different items in your navigation. Perhaps you have some pages which need a different style of display because of their purpose on the site. And generally in this sort of scenario you need editors to have some control over which items get these different views.
My son loves the Lego-branded games available via Steam. He's a massive fan of the Lego versions of Batman, Marvel and the recent Lego Movie game. But as much as he loves them, as the owner of the computer he plays on, I've found them frustrating. You buy a game, download it, and it works fine for a while. But at some point all of these games have suffered from a problem where you stop being able to launch them. Having had to figure out solutions via Google to keep my son happy, I'm writing this down so I can remember it next time...
A quick distraction from navigation patterns this week:
A while back I wrote a bit about issues with following the SDN instructions to create a new custom application on your Sitecore "start menu". Recently I responded to a Stack Overflow question about this issue, where after a bit of discussion I discovered that this didn't work quite the same way on Sitecore 7.5. So having investigated why, I figured I should write this up...
