Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I suspect a fairly common scenario for Sitecore developers is launching a new site which replaces an existing one with a shiny new design and content structure. It's a fairly common requirement of these projects that whoever is in charge of SEO will want redirects in place from important old URLs on the site, to new ones. They ensure that users who have bookmarks to the old pages don't see 404s, and try to keep the search engine rankings which had been acquired by the old site.
Another common scenario these days is for new websites to serve all of their pages under HTTPS, rather than just the "sensitive" pages as we might have done in the past.
When you combine these two needs together, you can end up with more complicated redirection rules than you might have needed in the past. If you're planning to make use of the the Url Redirect module from the Sitecore Marketplace, my experiences doing this might be of help to you:
It's nearly Christmas, and before I head off for a bit of a holiday, here's a quick bug issue you might encounter. Despite the increasing power and sophistication of the search technologies in Sitecore, sometimes we still need to fall back to good old-fashioned Sitecore Query. A common reason for this is because the query you're writing depends on the structure of the data, not its content. Recently a colleague of mine pointed out some issues to me with the way some queries are resolved, which I thought might be of interest to others.
In the past I've often renamed the default site entry from "website" to something more meaningful when creating the configuration for a project. If your instance of Sitecore is serving multiple websites, then it seems logical to me to name your site entries so they make sense against the purposes of these websites. However it seems that in the current version of Sitecore 8.0 this is a bad idea...
So, finally, we've got the prerequisites (Windows,
Mongo,
SQL) out of the way, we can get to installing Sitecore in this post. There are a load of ways of going about this, but my usual choice is automating the Sitecore
.exe
installer. Doing this via DSC gives you the basis of an installation which can be used across all your platforms. The process below is based on the approach I've used with ordinary PowerShell in the past, but adapted for DSC:
This week I've spent a bit of time trying to knock up a quick demo of how Coveo can cope with searching in languages other than English. However, it's just my luck that the language I have to demo in is not on the list of languages supported out-of-the-box: Welsh. Hence I've been investigating how to customise the UI so that things look right for my demo. Turns out there are a few things to think about:
Previously, I've written a few posts (here, here and here) about automation approaches and PowerShell scripts I was experimenting with for installing developer instances of Sitecore 6. It seems about time that I checked out how that scripting work copes with newer versions of Sitecore...
A while back I had the chance to look into the my initial install issue, I've spent a bit of time looking at Coveo's approach to the faceted search I'd used on some recent projects. Whilst this mostly works really easily, I've spotted a minor shortcoming in the out-of-the-box functionality which needed a quick work around for my scenario to work.
I encountered a strange error last week, while setting up a virtual machine for some testing: Double clicking the Sitecore 7.2 installer would show the "Extracting" dialog, but after a short while it would vanish and nothing else would happen...
Later this week I've got the chance to do some training on the Coveo for Sitecore search solution. The invite to the training said that attendees need to bring a computer running an instance of the software to use during the class. So I've been spending a bit of time building up a virtual machine for this purpose, to get a handle on the install process for Coveo.
Being the enthusiastic type, I tried doing this installation on a machine running Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 – but it turns out this wasn't a great idea.
I came across an interesting approach for improving the performance of
automated package installs
the other day. In the space of one day of internet reading I saw the
Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext
class mentioned
in a blog post
and it came up in MVP forum discussions. In both cases, it was mentioned in the context of making item operations faster. Hence it seemed like an interesting thing to investigate, to see what sort of difference it would make to my previous work.
