Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Last week I spoke at the London Sitecore Technical User Group, and discussed my experiences working on a project that had to provide a Faceted Search UI in Sitecore 6.6. As part of my example, I talked about how you can build Facets using Lucene when you don't have access to the newer search APIs available in Sitecore 7.x, and about how you can make your search UI configurable by editors to improve their user experience. And I said I'd post my example code and explanation. So here goes:
The last three posts have discussed some prototype code for a sitemap generator, and I want to wrap the series up with a few thoughts about how the size of your Sitemap build operation might affect your site.
Edit:
When I wrote this post I didn't know what the
SC_IISSITE_ID
parameter to the MSI was for. Since then I've discovered what it does. And it turns out that it and another parameter not discussed here are quite important if you want to install more than one instance of Sitecore on the same machine. If you want to make use of the automated approach below,
you should also read my more recent post about the parameters.
I got a question on twitter the other day about how you might go about using the automated install ideas I posted recently in a PowerShell script.
I'm not much of a PowerShell user, but here are a couple of suggestions:
The third part of this series is to look at how we can add images to our XML Sitemap files. We've looked at the configuration and the basic code to get entries into Sitemap files in the first two posts.
Getting images into the sitemap requires two things: First specifying some rules for what images to include, and secondly some code to extract those images from the content and write them into the index files. The code to deal with images that are specified in fields on the web page item is easy – but we also need to deal with the situation where the image is referred to by a component that has been dynamically bound to the page.
Last week we looked at the stuff to create in Sitecore to configure a custom sitemap generator. This week we'll carry on and look at the basic proof-of-concept code that can be used to process that configuration and generate a sitemaps and sitemap index files. It's another epic post...
Sitemap files are a requirement for most websites these days. They help SEO by ensuring that search engines index the files and images they might not otherwise find, and that you think are most important. Whilst there are assorted pre-built add-ons for Sitecore that can help with this, that's no fun. It's much more fun to build your own...
Real work is getting in the way of blogging time at the moment, so I'm going to break up my investigations into this into three posts. This week I'll look some requirements, core configuration and overall algorithm. The next part will look at the core code. And the final one will look at adding image data to the sitemap files.
Some time back I worked on a website which made extensive use of two bits of technology:
When the project was originally specified, these two things were thought of as individual aspects of the project and not much thought was put into the idea of bringing them together. But as the project progressed one of my colleagues realised that editors were basically being asked to enter the same data twice in some areas of the site. Once when they configured the metadata to drive the search facets, and once when they set up profile cards. We'd failed to spot the strong overlap between the data being entered in these two areas of the site.
As an experiment in "can it be done?" I tried to see if it was possible to index your DMS Profile Card data in Lucene, to allow it to be used as search facets. This never ended up in the actual project, but I thought it might be of interest in case anyone else finds themselves with a similar need.
I think I may be a bit behind the times here, as it's been ages since I've needed to download anything big from MSDN, but it seems that by default the MSDN File Transfer Manager tool doesn't work correctly with IE 11 at the moment. When you try to download something it always just tries to do a normal browser file download, and never launches the file transfer manager, even though you have it installed.
A neat little trick I discovered recently, and promptly forgot to share is that you can make use of Visual Studio's diff window for any pair of files, without the need for a project or solution. All you need is a little command line trickery.
There are quite a few ways to install Sitecore. You can run the .exe provided from SDN, use the Sitecore Instance Manager, or write your own scripts to automate configuring the bits in the official zip files. But, having done a bit of testing, it seems that you have to be careful about the security settings when you're using these different approaches. Whilst the .exe installer leaves you with a Sitecore instance that's relatively safe to expose to the internet, SIM does not seem to make all the same security settings. It's installs seem (by default) only suitable for private development instances. And the "roll it yourself" installs from Sitecore's ZIP packages are only ever as good as you make them – miss a step and you might open a security hole.
With that in mind, I've been thinking about install automation – can I solve the problem of getting an unattended install to work from the .exe file?
