Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
With the big news from Symposium being the start of Sitecore's move towards the SaaS market, it's interesting to have a think about what that means for us developers and architects in the medium to long term. Because it seems likely there's going to be quite a bit of change for us...
This year, my talk at Sitecore Symposium was an introduction to deploying Solr for production use. It covered why you want SolrCloud, what you need to plan for it, and how you can go about installing it. Enough for a beginner to get from a blank Windows Server to running SolrCloud, and Sitecore configured to match.
If you missed my talk, or if you saw it and want to study it further, then you are in luck!
One of the interesting changes that's part of the coming release of Sitecore v9.3 is the integration of the Solr installation into the SIF scripts for developers. Given I've had a go at doing this myself in the past, I thought it would be interesting to look at their approach and see how it works...
A problem I've encountered a number of times in my Sitecore career is that when content trees are large and indexing tasks complex, it can take such a long time to perform a full rebuild of a search index that your web application can end up recycling for some reason before the build completes... Once content grows to this size, search can become quite difficult to manage, so I've been experimenting with a tool to help.
It's only a few weeks until Sitecore Symposium**1 kicks off for this year. My presentation is taking shape nicely (more of that later) but I've also been considering what I'll be watching from the rest of the conference... So if you're looking for inspiration, or still on the fence about buying yourself a ticket, here's what I'm looking forward to around this year's event:
Every so often pretty much every developer ends up in a situation where they're looking at a bug that manifests on one platform, but not on another. The sort of bug where you end up spending hours looking through log and config files for a subtle difference. I found myself looking into just this sort of bug recently, but on a site where (to my frustration) the config files were full of comments and whitespace differences across platforms that made diffing really hard ** . Spotting that subtle bug-causing difference is pretty much impossible when your diff is full of noise... So how can we fix that?
In theory, the magic of Dynamic Placeholders lets us have a container component placed onto your page more than once. That didn't work in the old world of "static" placeholders, because the rendering engine didn't like two placeholders with the same name. But despite it's benefits, the dynamic implementation has an annoying edge case – you may not be able to enable caching for your container component. I had a client bump into this issue recently, so I spent some time considering approaches that might help them address this issue.
I've been working on an international deployment of Sitecore recently, and resolving some problems around how publishing raises remote events has demonstrated that there are some things about the publishing process that I didn't entirely understand... I doubt this is a common scenario, but it still seems worth writing down what I've learned – So here's another crib sheet for my future self:
Following on from my recent post about how I was able to mess up my life by getting Marketing Automation connection strings wrong, I hit another interesting issue with MA – this time around content languages...
I had another of my fun chats with Sitecore Support recently, for an issue that seemed to get no useful results in Google when I looked. So, as is my way, I'm filling that search-engine void today. This turned out to be entirely my fault – but it seems like the sort of mistake that others might encounter too... So if you've deployed a distributed instance of Sitecore and found Marketing Automation was behaving oddly, read on...
