Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I've written before about filtering data in Lucene searches if you're still using Sitecore 6.x. Having been doing more legacy work on this front over the last couple of weeks, I've got a couple of new things to add. Previously, the search work I'd been doing had relied on the default "relevance" sort order, or LINQ OrderBy clauses. However recently I've needed to enable some more complicated sorting, which has lead me to a few new (to me, at least) discoveries.
Not a Sitecore issue this week – but an issue I've been suffering from whilst working on Sitecore projects none the less. Like many IT companies working in the Microsoft space, we have a SharePoint site where our project documents live. Quite regularly, when I try to open one of those documents I get a login popup. Despite the fact that SharePoint is in my "Local Intranet" sites in Internet Explorer.
Recently this managed to annoy me enough that I took the time to investigate and fix the issue. Here's what I found:
I had to deal with a bug report in some Sitecore 6.6 / Advanced Database Crawler search code recently, relating to items with publishing restrictions not disappearing from search results until another publish occurred. It struck me that there's not much written about how publishing restrictions interact with search, so I figured I should take a bit of time to write down what I'd found while sorting the bug.
It is quite possible that this issue is entirely down to some odd aspect of the setup of the Virtual Machine I'm developing on at the moment, but recently I've experienced quite a few hangs when loading Sitecore solutions. Starting up Visual Studio to be greeted with a never ending progress bar:
Continuing on from previous discussions about packages and their definitions, I found myself needing to quickly merge together the definitions of two different packages recently. And that sounded like an opportunity for a simple tool to add to my collection.
My work sometimes involves picking up projects that were started by other developers / agencies and making changes or enhancements. Sometimes the approaches used by the original developers can make these enhancements harder than they need to be. The HTML, CSS and Javascript of a recent project I worked on caused some issues that I thought were worth calling out to try and help developers do better work in the future.
NB: This post was written about Sitecore V6.6 – if you're using Sitecore 7.5 you should look at the updated version instead.
Ever gone through the steps to create a new Application in the Sitecore "Start Menu", but had it not appear despite refreshing? I wasted an hour of my afternoon scratching my head over this issue recently, so I thought I would write down what I went through in case anyone else hits the same issue...
A bit of a change of tack this week. Rather than writing about something I've been doing, I'd like to ask for your ideas on something I've been thinking about. This issue is way to complex to compress into a tweet to ask on Twitter, and it seems too opinion based to be asked on Stack Overflow. So I'll ask it here, in the hope that some of you clever people might offer your opinions. Comment below, tweet me, write blog posts in response, send carrier pigeons or whatever. All thoughts appreciated...
So here's what I'm thinking about: How do you set up your projects for development?
The other day I was having a conversation with a colleague who was bemoaning the lack of a fast way to paste a Sitecore item path into the UI and have the Content Editor change selection to that item. I suggested using the search box or the Navigate button, but apparently they weren't right. The person wanted to paste a link and have the content tree change without any other clicking about.
So, in the spirit of being a helpful co-worker, I hacked up a quick command extension to solve this problem. It's trivially simple, but I figured someone else might find it useful, or learn something that helps them...
Last week I talked about an approach to displaying template-related help fields in Content Editor. The last week has been a bit manic, so I've not managed to spend much time on extending these ideas, but I have a basic approach to displaying similar data in Page Editor. Quick one today...
