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

This blog introduces you to concept of updating rendering and rendering parameters using Sitecore PowerShell Extension. If you are maintaining a web application based on Sitecore with loads of content items, you may be familiar with content cleanup or update requests that comes from business. This is where Sitecore PowerShell Extension comes very handy and saves our life. A little background .. We were using Media Framework based connector for Brightcove videos integration in Sitecore 8.2 website. When we upgraded to Sitecore 10.1, connector for Brightcove videos integration was also migrated from Media Framework to Data Exchange Framework. So far so good. But we realized that Media Framework based integration involved storing some video and video player related data in rendering parameters as in snapshot below -  We did not see these rendering parameters getting used anymore in Data Exchange Framework based integration. Hence, it was decided to remove these rendering parameters from r

If you are not already aware, Sitecore is moving its public feed from sitecore.myget.org to a different feed provider on November 30, 2023. The URL of the new public feed is: https://nuget.sitecore.com/resources/v3/index.json The URL for the internal artifact provider is: https://cloudsmith.io/~sitecore/repos/resources/groups/ The custom NPM feed will move from https://sitecore.myget.org/gallery/sc-npm-packages to the public NPM provider https://www.npmjs.com/ Both the original MyGet and the new public feeds are available now. After November 30, only the new NuGet and NPMJS public feeds will be available. Sitecore strongly recommends that all customers and partners update their CI/CD processes and build scripts to use the new public feeds as soon as possible to avoid interruptions beyond November 30, 2023. The above information is shared by Sitecore  here . How this can impact you? This can impact you if you are making use of these URLs. Such URLS are usually used in Build/Release (CI/

Is sxa_site cookie necessary for Sitecore website? If you are working on a requirement for cookie consent of your site, this question will definitely strike your mind. You would like to know that "sxa_site" cookie is not really necessary for Sitecore SXA websites. According to Sitecore support team, the website still works in case you remove the cookie. So, this is not one of the necessary cookies for cookie consent. Ever wondered what sets this cookie for Sitecore SXA sites? Following code in snapshot is used to set the cookie in Sitecore.XA.Foundation.Multisite.Pipelines.HttpRequest.StoreSiteNameInCookie processor- Even knowledge of such little things can be highly useful when handy at time. Hope you like it!!

 The Problem We are on Sitecore 10.1 update 2. We had a business requirement to allow HTML tags in single-line text fields so that page headings and subheadings can have superscripts etc. in them. We understand that for security reasons, Sitecore encodes all the HTML tags entered into the fields. This needed us to make sure to add logics in our backend to ensure that the HTML tags gets decoded so that they can be rendered at the front end. So far so good and everything went as planned. After the customization, we were able to see the HTML tags added to single-line text fields getting rendered properly at front-end.  Then where is the problem? We did a few more edits on the page and observed that HTML tags added to Single-Line text fields earlier got stripped off during subsequent edits and page saves. Here is a video of the issue -  The Research This issue was also reproducible on sandbox instances. This proved that it was not due to any of the customizations done in our solution. We r