Some people find it a bit tricky to write Sitecore config files. It can sometimes be a bit tricky or time consuming to get the element structure correct. Ever found yourself debugging an issue where it turned out the config file wasn’t applied properly due to an element structure mistake?

The XPath Tools plugin, by Uli Weltersbach, for Visual Studio is a great help for creating those config patch files. Here’s a way to create those in a fast and simple way:

Start with a Sitecore config boiler plate:

Then grab the expanded Sitecore config file through Sitecore Rocks:

Navigate to the section where you want to apply your config change and select “Copy XML structure”. In this example I’ll add a computed field to the default Solr index section:

Then paste it into your config template:

From here on it’s a simple task to just remove the surplus attributes you don’t need, such as database="SQLServer" xmlns:patch… and so on:

So XPath tool is a small but very helpful tool that makes life just a little bit easier.

You can get the XPath tool from within Visual Studio or download it here, or grab it from GitHub.

The Sitecore Publish Service vastly improves the publish performance in Sitecore. For me it was really hard to get it working properly and I’ve blogged about some of the issues before. I received a lot of good help from Sitecore Support and now it seems like I’ve got into a quite stable state.

However, there is a backside of the Publish Service that may affect the editing performance. Publish Service doesn’t use the PublishQueue table for knowing what to publish. Instead it has an event mechanism for detecting what needs to be published. As an item is saved, Sitecore emits events to the Publish Service so that it knows what pages should be put into the publish manifest.

Note: The solution in this post may not suit every project. Address this only if you’re experiencing the performance decade described and make sure you test everything well. Make sure you fully understand this approach before dropping it into your project.

As part of the Publish Service package, a item:saved event handler is added to do some post processing. When a unversioned field is changed on an item, the event handler loops over all versions of that language and updates the __Revision field. When a shared field is changed on an item, the event handler loops over all versions on all languages and updates the __Revision field. Thereby the Publish Service gets a notification that the content of the item has been changed.
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A Sitecore solution is typically behind one or several reverse proxies, such as load balancers, content delivery networks etc. From a Content Delivery server perspective, the remote address, i.e. “the visible client IP” is the closes proxy instead of the IP of the connecting client. To solve this, the chain of proxies adds a http header with the IP address it’s communicating with. This header is typically called X-Forwarded-For or X-Real-IP.

Below is an example of such setup. Each proxy adds the IP they’re receiving the connection from:

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After having tons of problems and several filed tickets on the initial release of Sitecore Publish Service 3.1, I was happy to find that Sitecore have addressed many of the problems of the previous versions. This update contains 12 fixes and I found my customer support ticket number listed six times.

Unfortunately the update didn’t solve these issues properly, so while I’m waiting for new patches I thought I’d share a UI fix that wasn’t included in the release. When working with multiple languages, the language list isn’t very user friendly in the Publish Service UI. It’s essentially just becomes a small letterbox with unsorted languages and a large area for displaying the targets.

This is the layout provided as default when having multiple languages:

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While investigating stability issues, I’ve found a few things that may need addressing.

Sitecore updates indexes in batches. This is good in general, but it turned out it may be very memory hungry. There are essentially two config parameters you can control the batch size with:

<setting name="ContentSearch.ParallelIndexing.Enabled" value="true" />
<setting name="ContentSearch.IndexUpdate.BatchSize" value="300" />

The default config above, essentially means Sitecore will start multiple threads processing 300 indexable objects each. This might not be an issue at all, but when combined with a multi-language setup, media indexing and crazy authors, this may become a real problem.
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Language Fallback is a powerful feature in Sitecore. It’s been around for years as a module and since Sitecore 8.1 it is part of the core product. In short, it allow values to be inherited between item language versions. This allows you to show default content when translation is missing. You may have dialects of a languages, such as US English vs British English, and you can use Language Fallback to avoid translating content that is the same for the two dialects etc.

TL;DR
Increase Caching.SmallCacheSize to about 10MB if you’re using Language Fallback in Sitecore.

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This is partly a follow-up post of my previous post on Workign with Solr and Sitecore Content Search in Sitecore 9. In that post I raised a few issues that needs to be dealt with, and I’ve found some more. Most of what’s in this post I’ve found on Sitecore 9.0 update-1 and/or Sitecore 8.2 update-5, and it seems like most of the things applies to many more versions too. So I’ve focused on how you can verify if your solution needs patching too.

This is essentially just a brief list of some issues I’ve found over the last few weeks, while working against the clock towards the releases of two large Sitecore projects. Big thank you to all my great colleagues that have put an enormous effort into getting things to work.
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During an upgrade project to Sitecore 9, I got some insights worth sharing. Some findings in this post applies to multiple Sitecore versions and some are specific to Sitecore 9. I’ve been using SolrCloud 6.6, but some of it applies to other versions as well. It be came a long, yet very abbreviated, post covering many areas.

In this post:

• Solr Managed schemas in Sitecore 9
• Tune and extend Solr managed schema to fit your needs
• How to fix Sitecore config for correct Solr indexing and stemming
• How to make switching index work with Solr Cloud
• How to reduce index sizes and gain speed using opt-in
• How to make opt-in work with Sitecore (bug workaround)
• Why (myfield == Guid.Empty) won’t give you the result you’re expecting

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Thank you Sitecore for awarding me “Technology Most Valuable Professional” (MVP) again! Six years in a row!

The Sitecore MVP Award celebrates the most active Sitcore community members from around the world who provide valuable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference.

My contribution to Sitecore and the community over the last year have, besides this blog, have been a continuous dialog with Sitecore staff on how to improve the product and I’ve filed around thirty confirmed bugs. I’ve also held a few talks on Sitecore User Group Gothenburg (SUGGOT) and a few modules are shared on GitHub.

By default, Sitecore stores media files as blobs in the database. This is usually good, but if you have a large volume of files, this can become too heavy to handle. So I wrote a Sitecore plugin where you can seamlessly store all the binaries in the cloud.
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A colleague of mine spent several hours finding a very nasty problem in one of our Sitecore environments. Thomas did a great job on this, so all creds him. I thought we should share this finding with the community as well.
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Sitecore has a quite advanced access right management system. However, I’ve found a few quite common requirements that, as far as I know, isn’t supported out of the box. One is to allow content authors to remove individual item versions without allowing them to remove the entire item. This is especially useful for multi language sites. Another requirement is to allow authors to delete items they have created themselves, but no other items.

I’ve seen people work around these kind of issues by playing around in the core database, modifying ribbon buttons etc. Personally I don’t like that approach. That would just hide the button and if the user could initiate the command in any other way, Sitecore will gladly perform the delete action. It’s easy to forget a command action in a context menu or something like that.

Instead I created a very small Sitecore module to solve these issues. All the source is available on Github.
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Some say target="_blank" is one of most underestimated vulnerabilities on the web. When you make a link to an external into a new tab or window, that site gets access to your site. If it’s a design flaw in browsers or something else is debatable, but luckily there is a simple fix for it by adding rel="noopener" to external links.
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Sitecore have awarded Volvo Construction Equipment, with partner Stendahls, winner of the Sitecore Experience Award 2016, Marketing Agility category. The Marketing Agility award recognizes marketing teams that have made significant, measurable gains in productivity and marketing ROI through the Sitecore platform. This year’s winners outlined clear before and after scenarios for team output and content publishing times as well as any associated organizational or team advantages, as a result of time/resource savings.

I’ve spent most of my working time during 2015 and 2016 on this huge project, where we built the whole marketing platform and rolled out 123 market and dealer websites, representing Volvo’s business in more than 140 countries on 30+ languages. The solution contains about 370k items and is managed by more than 150 editors worldwide, all in the same Sitecore solution.

A lot of my time went into creating a streamlined development process, build and maintain a fast and stable hosting platform and build a very efficient authoring environment. Many of my blog posts during the last year have sprung out of this project.

Volvo CE Press release

Some time ago, Martin Davies started a thread on the Sitecore MVP community forum about where to store page content. It caught a lot of attention and many replies. Since that’s a closed forum, I thought I’d might as well write a public post on my view on this topic, but also put into a wider perspective. It almost ended up in a recipe on how to build Sitecore websites. Nothing in this post is new really, so I’ve kept each topic as brief as possible.

This post is only about the basics of Sitecore as a CMS. Sitecore can do so much more. But I’ve seen so many, in my opinion, implementation failures, where the customer can’t get passed the content management hell and never starts walking up the experience maturity ladder. The implementing partners plays a very important role here ensuring the content authoring environment doesn’t become messy, time consuming or non-intuitive.
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Thank you Sitecore for awarding me “Technology Most Valuable Professional” (MVP) again! Fifth year in a row!

The Sitecore MVP Award celebrates the most active Sitcore community members from around the world who provide valuable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference.

My contribution to Sitecore and the community over the last year have, besides this blog, been continuous dialog with Sitecore staff on how to improve the author experience in the product and over forty confirmed bug reports.

As a lead architect and DevSecOp of this huge website project, www.volvoce.com, I expect a lot of blog posts during 2017 about our findings and how to create and maintain great websites.

I faced a problem where I need to control the Sitecore html cache from within a controller action. There are probably many scenarios where this is needed. In my particular case, the output from the controller is cacheable in the Sitecore html cache, but my controller action is also dependent on a third party system. The communication with this system could sometimes fail. Essentially it means that if the controller fails, I don’t want the html output to be cached either. If it is cached, as it is by default, my error message will stay there until the html cache is cleared, regardless if the third party system is online or not.
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Since 7.5, Sitecore introduced Media Request Protection that is essentially a hash added to some URL’s. Some people find this annoying, but I think this was a good move. If someone would just hammer your site by downloading media images with random width and height parameters, it would cause a lot of image resizing and consequently eat up all CPU.

The idea behind the Media Request Protection is to avoid these kind of denial of service attacks, by having a hash parameter on the URL. On an incoming media request, Sitecore calculates the hash of the request query string parameters and compares it with the given hash. If they are equal, Sitecore performs the resizing options (or whatever parameters are provided). If they are not equal, Sitecore will just send the original file as-is.
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Serving optimized images on websites is essential to get high performances website and get a good user experience. There are numerous implementations of this and here is yet another one. Inspired by Anders Laub previous posts on cropping and compressing images, I decided to make one that makes optimized progressive images.

Normal images are loaded from top to bottom, aka baseline images. The advantage of progressive images is that the entire image is shown almost right away, but the image is blurry at first when only a portion of the image is loaded and the image then becomes clearer as more image data is loaded in the browser. This makes the perceived load speed faster to the viewer.
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There are always room for improvements of the Experience Editor. Here are a few simple ones to fix.

Since Sitecore 8.1, field validation results are shown inline in text fields. This is quite useful for content editors, both for showing errors, but also to give soft errors, such as warnings or suggestions.

One can argue that all non-valid results from validators are errors, but I think it makes more sens to say “Show suggestion” instead of “Show error” next to a validation suggestion.
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