Tag Archives: sitecore

3 New Sitecore v7.2 Bugs You Need To Know About Before Go-Live

Sitecore Bugs

The Mystery of the Disappearing Content

That’s the general nature of these bugs. Except the PublishEmptyItems bug can cause entire sites to disappear. Happened to me. 2 hours of downtime. Was going crazy trying to inspect every single line of my configuration files, restoring DBs, and going through logs.

The new Sitecore v7.2 has a lot of great features and I personally recommend upgrading after a thorough QA test to make sure things run smoothly, but it wouldn’t be “software” if it didn’t cause your site to sink into a pothole once in a while. That’s the nature of the beast.

New PublishEmptyItems Setting

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Publish Related Items & Defining Custom Relationships via Code – Sitecore

related items

Version v7.2 Released

First and foremost, I’d like to congratulate the Sitecore Dev team on the new v7.2 release. I’ve been using Sitecore since v6.1 and since then, have developed a modest wish list of features I would have loved to see. I can honestly say, this version is jam-packed with features from that list.

Publish Related Items Feature – Explained

One of those new awesome features is the Publish Related Items feature. What. A. Timesaver.
Publish Related Items
It’s especially great for rapid development and deployment. Imagine you are developing a new feature.

  • You create the template.
  • You create the layouts.
  • You upload the media.
  • You create the content based on the templates, with the mapped layouts in the presentation layer and associate any media in the image files

You want to publish? Before v7.2, you had to publish each one individually. Not that rapidly deployed. Now, with Publish Related Items checked, all those assets associated with the content item you are publishing will get published, including any and all images contained within the content item, layouts, and templates.

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Video Tutorial – Setting up LINQPad for Use with Sitecore

sitecorelinq

Not sure if this is Sitecore removing the training wheels and bib or movin’ on up to the east side, but as of version 7.1, Sitecore is deprecating the Developer Center and removing it shortly thereafter. As soon as I heard, I reached out to Alex Shyba (@alexshyba) and he pointed me to LINQPad. The LINQPad site had no mention of Sitecore, so I went on a Google scavenger hunt and found Adam Conn’s blog post that covered the steps, along with some pointers Jim Scott’s Coding Blog.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for me and I was at an hour or two in until I got the everything to work, so I thought why not do a video walkthrough and save my readers the headache.

The video is embedded below and the link to the configuration file is posted to my GitHub here.
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Lessons Learned: Upgrading Sitecore from 6.1 to 6.5

alright
Just deployed the latest and greatest in Sitecore for my company. The guy on the left knows what I am talking about.

With the multiple languages and the complexity level of my company’s site, this was not a simple process of just running a couple of SQL update scripts and modifying some lines in the web.config. This upgrade took at couple of weeks and there were a lot of lessons learned along the way. Hopefully, my lessons will save you some time if you are going the same route.

By the way, shout out to @alexshyba once again, for pointing me to the right places and saving me hours upon hours of time.

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Using Sitecore Publishing Pipeline to Refresh External CDN Cache

This is either one of those things you may never have to use, or you come across a requirement and realize this is exactly what you need and just didn’t know what it was called.  I fell into the latter category when I needed to programmatically refresh images in my media library that were cached in my company’s content delivery syndicator – Akamai.   Thankfully, @AlexShyba pointed me in the right direction.

Goal
Clear external image/CDN cache when a media item gets published.

Solution

The PublishProcessor object is located in the Sitecore.Publishing.Pipelines.Publish namespace. We will need to inherit from this object to your own class and override the Process(PublishContext) method with our own custom functionality.

The PublishContext that’s passed in by Sitecore’s publishing processor has a list of items being published.  All we have to do is iterate through the list and use the Sitecore Item’s Path.IsMediaItem property to determine if it’s a media library item or not.  If it is, we just pass it or its full path to a custom method and use whatever API is provided by your CDN of choice to force refresh on it.

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