Sitecore Docs - Tech Tips by GS

Sitecore Publishing Service  (SPS) is an opt-in mechanism for high-performance publishing in large scale Sitecore setups. This module increases publishing throughput, reduces the amount of time spent publishing large volumes of items, and offers greater data consistency and reliability. The module also improves the user experience and provides better visual feedback to the user on the state of the publishing system. If you don't use SPS yet and if your publishing tasks take longer than expected, SPS module can be highly useful to you. In this blog, I am going to share a recent experience related to configuring SPS in scaled environment. There is a specific step in installation guide which needs to be performed explicitly in scaled environments and if you miss it, you may have problems publishing related items with the page. THE PROBLEM In our case, publishing worked correctly but none of the related items of published page got published. We reached out to community on slack and als...

This post intends to get you familiar with how Sitecore manages SelectRendering dialogs found in  Experience Editor , how  Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)  module is able to override those dialogs and how we can still use vanilla Sitecore based SelectRendering dialogs even after installing SXA module. We are working on upgrading our application from Sitecore 8.2 to Sitecore 10.1.1. We have 100+ sites in our  existing   Sitecore instance and we are moving them from vanilla Sitecore sites to SXA based sites. Problem While testing the pages in Experience Editor, we noticed that the SXA based SelectRendering Dialog is different from vanilla Sitecore 10.  For e.g. when you click on Add Here to add a rendering  on your page  in Experience Editor in Sitecore 10, below dialog opens up -  Due to the structure in our legacy Sitecore 8 application, lots of tabs started appearing in SelectRendering dialog which looked confusing as in snapshot above...

This post intends to get you familiar with where Sitecore keeps code for dialogs that are rendered in Experience Editor and how they can be modified using a problem we solved recently. PROBLEM We may want to hide some out-of-box elements in Sitecore's Experience Editor for meeting specific business needs. In our case, w e were upgrading from Sitecore 8.2 to Sitecore 10.1.1 recently and migrated our vanilla Sitecore sites to be SXA site.  We decided to keep content author experience in Sitecore 10 instance as close as possible to Sitecore 8 so that we don't end up re-training our content authors spread globally almost in every country. Obviously, SXA presents a slightly different interface in Experience Editor and we started finding workaround for them. We observed that, in Experience Editor, while creating/selecting a rendering's datasource, there is a new  Clone Current Content option which didn't exist in Sitecore 8 as in snapshot below -  This option was new to Conte...

Sitecore server performance depends a lot on underlying SQL server performance. If SQL server performance decreases, Sitecore server performance will decrease too. That's why its important to have SQL server maintenance plans.  Maintenance plans create a workflow of the tasks required to make sure that your database is optimized, regularly backed up, and free of inconsistencies. You can learn more about maintenance plans here . We observed that a poor maintenance plan can lead to SQL timeout errors in application and the high fragmentation level in the SQL indexes can have major role to play in it. Sitecore recommends keeping index fragmentation below 10% If you see error in your logs which read something like below, its time for you to check your index fragmentation levels and revisit your SQL server maintenance plans -  Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. How to know if index fragmentatio...

 If you have used Data Exchange Framework with Sitecore, you would be familiar with the concept of Queues and Queue Processors . A queue processor reads entries from a work queue and then handles each entry. Which entries and how each entry is handled is determined by the queue processor. Queues and Queue Processors appear in your Data Exchange Framework tenants at following path - /sitecore/system/Data Exchange/Your Tenant/Queues If you are upgrading to Data Exchange Framework 6 like us from an older version, you will find that these Queues related items don't exist in your tenant anymore in a new installation. If you have upgraded your databases or installed Data Exchange Framework package on top of older version, you may still see these items as they may have not got removed. You may want to test the impact on your Data exchange framework functionality and remove them. It is recommended to find what particular things the custom processors and converters used in Queues ...

The Publishing Service module is an optional replacement for the existing Sitecore publishing methods. This module increases publishing throughput, reduces the amount of time spent publishing large volumes of items, and offers greater data consistency and reliability. The module also improves the user experience and provides better visual feedback to the user on the state of the publishing system. We decided to use  Sitecore Publishing Service  due to large amount of content in our Site nodes and site publishes that run for more than an hour. Problem When we started implementing with Sitecore Publishing Service on our development machines by following the instructions from SPS installation guide, we got stuck at point where the SPS won't start and will give an error as in the snapshot below -  Solution To solve this problem, we started looking into the logs but the logs did not even record this activity. We were left clueless. We decided to start this service using powers...

In this blog, I will describe about a Sitecore bug in version 10.1.1 where developers face issues if they try to use out-of-box placeholder items and especially when they try to move them from their default location. Problem We are working on upgrading from Sitecore 8.2 to Sitecore 10.1.1. We are making use of content placeholder present in Sitecore placeholder settings out of the box.  We are updating our solution to follow Helix conventions and decided to move the content placeholder to Project folder. But we encountered a weird issue in moving the 'content' placeholder to any Helix layer. To our surprise, it wont move after numerous attempts. We tried dragging the content placeholder item but that didnt work. Then we tried copying it using right click but that too didnt work. We tried updating its location in ymls related to it and then pushed the item but no success was achieved. Solution We created a Sitecore support ticket to understand this behavior Sitecore support team...