Sitecore Caching Utility

Sitecore caching can be quite large and complex to explain I don’t want to confuse anyone and you can look at the following article which will give you a good overview of Sitecore caching. This blog post has been created to show case a simple utility that can be used to insert your minor data or more complex objects into the Sitecore cache just like you would for the HttpRuntime.

New Sitecore Google Maps Module

IE is proud to announce the release of our first Sitecore Shared Source Module. The module that has been developed by IE to replace the existing Google Maps module. Whilst the old module has served the community well for many years due to advances in the Google Maps API and Sitecore it has now passed its used by date and desperately needed a re-vamp.

For more information visit IE’s Blog

Sitecore AbortStaticFiles with Pipeline

Sitecore has a very flexible pipeline implementation allowing developers to extend the basic behaviours of how a page/file etc will be handled. In certain cases you don’t want to kill the system and just let certain files be executed without the Sitecore context and let the files be returned to the user as quickly and with minimal processing required. Now why do we want this, if you allow ASP.NET to handle all traffic, such as turing off extensions and friendly media file names then ASP.NET is running over every single server request made to the system, such as calling static files like jquery-1.5.js etc.

Sitecore Value cannot be null, Parameter name: path

Got this error on a project working on and couldn’t quickly resolve the issue. It was happening when logging into the Content Editor only and with “Standard Fields” enabled so was a tricky one.

Thanks to Sitecore 6.4 now working within Firefox.

 

What i did to resolve the issue was;

• Open Firefox
• Open Sitecore and login as admin in Desktop user
• Open your Sitecore Control Panel (sitecore bar/control panel)
• Preferences
• Change your application preferences
• Make sure “Fields from the Standard Template” is off and click ok
• No open the “Content Editor”
• Click on the “Home” item (default one supplied by Sitecore)
• Click Presentation tab
• Hit “Reset” in ribbon and continue
• Now Click on another item somewhere even “Content”
• Click “View” from ribbon and enable “Standard Fields”
• Now click on the “home” item and it should now load

What the issue seems to be is a reference to a layout, rendering, sublayout etc.
Hope this helps someone.

Embed Sitecore in an existing ASP.NET site

Sometimes I’m asked can we quickly embed Sitecore in our existing ASP.NET site because of various reasons or it’s just a quick way to get it up and working while slowly migrating there site over. Well this you can do but you have to make a few small modifications to get it working or else you’ll run into some small headaches.
PS: This is a very very quick wiki article so don’t mind my rushing

Sitecore XSLT with Padlocks on navigation

Sitecore will renderer out the navigation items based on the security that the user has, this is great in most cases but say you need a site where you have a simple is logged in/logged out approach and the navigation needs to always indicate that a page is secure. Of course our actual padlocks are images but you get the idea.

Well with Sitecore it’s not as difficult as you would think

Dynamic “Sitecore.Caching.ICacheable” GetDataLength method

Sitecore uses the Sitecore.Caching.ICacheable interface which is well very easy to start working with but there is one little part which i found to be well a little pain. The issue is that you have to manually work out how big the data being to cached is, well what i see with this is that it’s not as correct as it should be.

Sitecore CreateFromStream

To upload new Media item you can do it a few ways but as for the easiest i’ve found that using the CreateFromStream method is by far the quickest for coding.

Bascially this method located at “Sitecore.Resources.Media.MediaManager.Creator.CreateFromStream” allows the user to upload a document while at the same time setting the basic media options and location of where this new media item will be situated.

Sitecore Cryptography Error

I seems to be getting this error more and more when loading a fresh instance of Sitecore on my system as well as on Windows Server 2008, now have I modified anything, well nope nothing.

The error is listed below “System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: The system cannot find the file specified.“

Sitecore Load Balancer Issues

Well this is my first Sitecore blog and don’t want to give to much away so i’ll start small.

Sitecore out of the box works perfectly fine on a load balanced envrionment but just certain components don’t work as expected one of these is the users being logged in.

The reason for this isn’t Sitecore it self but the way .net and iis actually work. Each dynamic site needs an iis application created which stores all the sites application data as well as session based information. Ok you might say push this over to SQL then well that resolves some of the issues but not all.