Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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.
