Month: January 2015

Redirecting URLs After Major Content Restructure In Sitecore

Posted on by jammykam

About a year or so ago I was working on a project which involved an upgrade from Sitecore 6.4 to 7.0 (the latest version at the time). The upgrade was fairly incidental, the site was (kind of) “working fine” in production. The main reason for touching the codebase was to fix issues due to a poor implementation that was carried out initially, namely:

  • Lack of Page Editor support
  • Poor coding not following Sitecore Best Practices
  • Sitecore section in Web.config modified directly (which made upgrading more difficult)
  • Poorly structured Content Tree
  • Difficulty applying a good security model for multi-site, multi-editor environment

…amongst others. It wasn’t all bad, just some common mistakes made by developers struggling with Sitecore during a first implementation.

One issue was the poorly structured content tree. It seems there was struggle with getting a handle on how to structure content whilst trying to use that same structure to create the navigation menu on the site. They had the usual “Include In Navigation Menu” checkboxes but the navigation structure did not actually completely match the content structure.

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How to Debug Sitecore Kernel in Visual Studio using Reflector Pro or dotPeek

Posted on by jammykam

A post from Georgi Bilyukov a couple of months ago about Debugging Sitecore Using DotPeek informed me of a new feature in the latest version of JetBrains dotPeek that allows it to function as a symbol as a symbol server. If you haven’t read the post then I suggest you have a quick read.

So this sounded great – a way to debug Sitecore code, see where those calls end up and what is going on in the internals.

I’ve been using dotPeek for a while now, and before that .NET Reflector. These tools have been invaluable in getting a peek at the Sitecore code, and has become an everyday tool alongside Visual Studio and Resharper. My usual way of trying to debugging something Sitecore related is:

  • trial and error
  • copying the code for an existing pipeline and adding it before the default Sitecore one
  • override Sitecore controls, changing the codebeside to point to my own Class (which is also a copy of the Sitecore one)
  • grepWin the /sitecore folder
  • use dotPeek to generate a Visual Studio project and then grepWin the files to try and find something related as a starting point

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Domain Sharding Media Requests in Sitecore

Posted on by jammykam

There have been a number posts about using Sitecore with a CDN provider and there is even a Sitecore CDN Connector module available Marketplace. Although the benefits of using a CDN provider are fairly well stated, such as reducing load on your server and allowing distributed datacentres, Sitecore itself does a pretty good job with its Media Library and for the vast majority of projects using a CDN may be overkill. Bedsides, there have been various projects I’ve worked on where they did not want the additional expense for little benefit or were unable to use a CDN to due to company policy or project requirements/specifications.

A project I was recently working on was utilising Edge Caching services from Akamai. If you’ve never used this type of service before, you need to re-route requests to your site to Akamai (by changing the DNS entry to point there). You can then configure Akamai as to which type of content should be served from cache and which needs to be forwarded on to your own server. There is nothing else for you to change, i.e. you do not need to provide a different domain prefix for your media items. This was an existing setup to the project from a previous vendor and seemed to work pretty well to meet the clients needs. One of the benefits we lose from not having a different domain name is the ability to domain shard.

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