Ghanendra's Tips

Recently, I had the honor of being awarded the Sitecore MVP award for Technology in 2023. I wrote about my experience here  and promised that I will keep sharing about my learnings from the program. So, here are some insights from Sitecore MVP Kickoff webinar. The webinar basically outlines what MVP program is about. There were presentations about the roadmap for Sitecore in 2023, little bit description about different tools Sitecore is comprised of now and then some presentations from community expert Tamas Varga, Peter Brinkmann etc. where they talked about MVP program and how they can help MVPs with works related to Sitecore. Some key interesting points I learnt and that I can share with you guys are below -  What do people do to become eligible for MVP award? Below is the list of contributions that Sitecore MVPs usually make over the year- What are the benefits of being a Sitecore MVP? One of the main questions that got answered was what are the benefits of being a Sitecore MVP and

When we install the Sitecore instance on local, the first load is slow. After each code deploy also, it takes a while for the Sitecore instance to load and experience editor to come up. For us, the load time for Sitecore instance on local machines was around 4 minutes. We started looking for ways to minimize it and found that if we update our Web.config to use Roslyn compiler and include the relevant Nugets into the project, our load times will improve. We followed the simple steps - Go to the Project you wish to add the NuGet package and right click the project and click 'Manage NuGet Packages'. Make sure your 'Package Source' is set to nuget.org and go to the 'Browse' Tab and search Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform. Install whichever version you desire, make sure you note which version you installed. You can learn more about it  here . After installation, deploy your project, make sure the Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.d

Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) is a system for serializing, sharing, and deploying content items, as well as keeping them in version control. It combines best of both Unicorn and TDS tools used widely in Sitecore applications for content serialization. If you havent used it yet, you should give it a try and learn more from  here . The Problem Recently, while performing a dotnet sitecore ser pull command to get latest updates of an item into source control, I got the below errors -  System.InvalidOperationException: Error while writing serialized item C:\projects\MyProbject.Website\src\Project\MyProjct\code\module\serialization\MySite\Home.yml ---> System.InvalidOperationException: Serialized version contained a blank language value! So this looked familiar with invariant language issue where an item may have field values in a language that doesn't exist or to put simply no language or blank language. This makes the item an invalid item and hence, it fails the serializati

The Journey I have been working in Sitecore for almost 10 years now. When I was a beginner in Sitecore, I was highly impressed by the incredible community support. In fact, my initial Sitecore learning path was entirely based on community written blogs on Sitecore. During a discussion with my then technology lead Neeraj Gulia , he proposed the idea that I should start giving back to developer community whenever I get chance. Just like I have been helped by many developers via online blogs, stackoverflow etc., I should also try to help others. Fast forward a few years and I met  Nehemiah Jeyakumar  (now an MVP). He had a big archive of his technical notes in the form Sitecore blogs. I realized my first blog dont have to be perfect and it can be as simple as notes to a specific problem for reference in future. That's when I probably created my first blog post on Sitecore. At that time, I didn't knew about the Sitecore MVP program. Over the years, I gained more confidence to write

Hello All! This year I learnt many new cool stuff about Sitecore 10 especially Docker, Sitecore Publishing Service, SXA etc. I wish I could touch other products of Sitecore as well. I will try to do that in 2023.  I would take this opportunity to list what I have done this year.  BLOG POSTS Below are the links to all my blogs which I have published in year 2022 on Sitecore.  https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/11/all-items-removed-from-sitecore-web-db.html https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/11/limit-on-number-of-sxa-sites-sitecore.html https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/11/old-versions-of-sitecore-pages-get.html https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/11/related-items-not-published-in-sitecore.html https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/09/replace-sxa-based-selectrendering.html https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/05/sitecore-10-queues-removed-in-data.html https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/03/bug-in-sitecore-10-unable-to-move-out.html https://ghanendras.blogspot.com/2022/04/sitecore

This happened recently i n our publishing service when we started seeing below error that caused publishing to fail for items-  Mvc.ExceptionHandling.AbpExceptionFilter - Reading the request body timed out due to data arriving too slowly. See MinRequestBodyDataRate. Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel.Core.BadHttpRequestException: Reading the request body timed out due to data arriving too slowly. See MinRequestBodyDataRate. On investigating, it was found that our job queue was somewhat big, and our operations table were very large. This could be what's causing this issue to occur in publishing service. We connected with Sitecore support and they recommended to modify the cleanup tasks on the publishing service side to clear these tables more often. This can be achieved by using the below patch on publishing service side -  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Settings>   <Commands>     <Web>       <Services>         <Add> 

In this post, I am going to talk about a very weird issue we faced and how we troubleshooted it. One fine morning, a QA in our team updated us that she is unable to see anything on CD server. All she sees is the Sitecore aspx page with error saying layout not found. We started looking for the item in web db to find out what was wrong and phewww, web db was missing all the items we had built ever. To fix this issue temporarily, we published everything from master to web db. But this kept happening over and over. We started looking at the Publishing Dashboard to get any cues and we saw hundreds of queued jobs as in snapshot below -  These jobs seem to be getting queued automatically. We started investigating logs in Sitecore cm instance and on publishing service machine to get any traces of what is happening. We also found that our publishing service instance went unresponsive due to such large number of requests. We recycled its application pool to get it back to working state. We check