Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
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.
I came across a Sitemap generation code), the idea interested me enough to do a bit more research into the topic, and try to work out the details.
So here's some notes on the hows and whys of using code to change layout details. (I'm working on Sitecore 6.6 here, but this information is relevant to many versions of Sitecore)
Another helpful addition to the "scripted installs" functions I've been looking at for the last few weeks is the ability to trigger a full rebuild of a search index. Last week we looked at deferring the indexing of items installed by a package to try and help speed up the scripted install of packages. So it makes sense to be able to trigger a build as well...
