Ghanendra's Tips

Maintaining websites in Sitecore helps you discover interesting issues. In this blog, we discuss one such issue :) The Problem We all know that Sitecore has the ability to resize images based on the query parameters that are supplied in a media item's URL. You must have already figured out that animated GIF files become not animated after resizing in Sitecore (it is in this blog's title itself).  Wondering why it happens? According to Sitecore in  KB1001735   -  There is no built-in .NET functionality to resize a GIF file and keep its properties (for example, the delay between frames). In this case, only the first frame of the file is displayed. As a result, the animated GIF file might become not animated after resizing it using Sitecore.   What this means is if you have a GIF like this -  and if you want to resize it in Sitecore, it will appear like this -  Sitecore has suggested a fix for it in the KB article which skips resizing of GIF files to prevent GIF files from becomin

We have been using Sitecore Publishing Service for a while now and it has helped to reduce the publishing time. It takes publishing operations to a separate server which is good architecture. Any hiccups on the publishing service side don't impact our Sitecore servers directly  and we have been enjoying it so far. The Problem.. We have faced few bumps as well on our publishing service ride. We have been facing an issue where our Sitecore Publishing Service will get unresponsive after a week of acting normal. This blocks publish operations, publishing dashboard flashes errors and content stops getting pushed to live servers. As a quick fix, we restart the publishing service and that helps to clear the clutter. We have been working on finding a permanent fix for it. The Solution.. (for now) We got in touch with Sitecore Support. After analyzing our application, logs etc. they suggested that our application publishes more than what Sitecore publishing service's  default settings a

The Problem While working on Sitecore, it may happen that one of your SSL certificates may expire after some time. This can cause functionalities to break.  For e.g., I encountered a problem where the SOLR search functionalities on my local Sitecore instance stopped working. You may be having similar problem if you face following issues -  when you search a GUID in Content Editor to locate an item, it would not return any result and say that an exception has occurred.  when you try to rebuild my SOLR indexes using Rebuild Search Indexes in Control Panel, the dialog did not list any of my SOLR indexes. The Research I looked into the logs to find the root cause to the problem and found following warnings -  128216 15:40:08 WARN  IsOnline: Test connection has failed with an exception. Type: 'SolrConnectionException', Message: 'The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.' I tried to load my local SOLR instance