Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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.
Talking about this with a colleague a while back, I wondered if there was a way of trying to reduce the likelihood of this sort of mistake for new users. Here's a quick example of an idea I came up with:
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...
