You might recognize this scenario. During your project you encounter some problem and you need the help of Sitecore Support. You create a new ticket and then you need to wait until their first reply. If you only wrote down you issue and didn’t provide any log files, the first reply will probably be to provide those log files. Of course these log files are necessary (especially when your ticket isn’t a know issue) to investigate your problem. To speed things up More Info »

With the Sitecore API it’s very easy to add items to the cache. You van use Sitecore.Caching.Cache to do the necessary operations. To add something to the cache you can use several overloads. Most of the time you want to add an expiration to the cached data. You have two different overloads to do this. Add(string key, object data, long dataLength, TimeSpan slidingExpiration) Add(string key, object data, long dataLength, DateTime absoluteExpiration) First method is to add a sliding expiration. The second method More Info »

As Solution Architect a part of my job is doing product demo’s and building Proof Of Concepts. The best way for me is to build stuff based on a clean install of Sitecore with the involved modules installed (like DMS, SES or ECM). Normally you will do this with the default Sitecore installer and manually install the modules you need, but this will take to much of your precious time. With the  SitecoreInstaller you can install Sitecore with selected modules in one More Info »

Recently I ran into a familiar lucene exception within my sitecore solution. Its lucene’s TooManyClauses exception. In fact the exception occures when there are more then 1024 where clauses in your query. That seems a lot but by using a wildcard query for example lucene is translating your wildcard query into a lot of where clauses after analyzing it. Offcourse the first step is to take a good look at your query and if possible try to rewrite. After that it’s possible More Info »

Did you hear of the Sitecore Log Analyzer? The Sitecore Log Analyzer is a great tool. It does what the name claims; It will help you analyze your log files! A short list of some great features: Quick analyze of all log files in a directory Date and string filter Tabs for the different categories; Messages, Audit and Health Monitor Filters for log levels; Errors, Warnings and Info’s Log entries sorted on number of occurrences Timeline overview of the (filtered) log entries Great statistics More Info »

In Sitecore you can personalize your website with conditions and actions using the Rules Engine (so called Conditional Rendering rules).  In Sitecore 6.5 the interface for defining conditional rendering rules is integrated in to the page-editor, this way it´s easier for the marketeer to create and maintain pesonalization rules. But as a developer you want to create predefined rules and activate them on the template standard values, the same way personalisation was working in Sitecore 6.4. This is still posible with 6.5 only by default the More Info »

Tired of switching between the Master and Core database during development? Making the mistake of making changes on the wrong database? Install the Customized Startbar Module. This module will do multiple things, but the main two things that I really like are: You can add buttons to the Quicklaunch bar. Add the database name next to the database icon (bottom right) The startbar before installation The startbar after installation You can download the Customized Startbar module from trac: http://trac.sitecore.net/CustomizedStartbar/ (Thanks to Alistair More Info »

To make thinks easier for the business-users you can use Icons for templates. This is a great way to make the business-user recognize the different types of content they can create. But did you know you can also use icons for your Fieldsections? Set Icon with the webinterface You can set icons for Fieldsections the same way as you do for your templates. Just open the content editor, expand a template and underneath a template you will find all your FieldSections. Select More Info »

In certain cases you want to offer the end-user a userfriendly interface to manage content, users or anything else. Thanks to Sitecore’s backend flexibility this is possible in more ways than one. In this case I will use the technique which is described in this blogpost by Adam Conn. In the example you can see that a new window is opened by the code below: public override void Execute(CommandContext context) { Assert.ArgumentNotNull(context, “context”); UrlString url = new UrlString(“/sitecore/shell/~/xaml/GridExample.GridExamplePage”); url["id"] = context.Items[0].ID.ToString(); SheerResponse.ShowModalDialog(url.ToString(), More Info »