Sitecore Snippets

Update GeoIp info in DMS database

2012-04-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

Many of you have probably seen "IP_NOT_FOUND" entries in Engagement Analytics application.

Usually, it's a visits from internal IP address (like 192.*.*.* or 10.*.*.*) - your company network, monitoring systems, etc.
Such addresses cannot be resolved by MaxMind, so they're just displayed as "Not Found". Also, sometimes you might want to update GeoIP information manually (for example, if you know more about the particular IP than MaxMind does)

The simplest way to do it is to update the DMS database directly. This can be done in 2 easy steps.
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Sitecore Snippets - Blog Statistics Overview

2012-01-01T12:39:00.000-08:00

Year 2011 is over, and it's time to look back to review and analyze blog statistics, as well as summarize yearly achievements.

There was about 6000 unique visitors, who generated more than 15000 page views this year. About 30% of them live in United States.

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Sitecore GeoIP Country Resolving - Jump to Lightspeed

2011-12-10T06:35:00.001-08:00

There is always a trade-off between the website performance and the number of features you want to provide to the visitors. With MaxMind GeoIP services, which are tightly integrated with Sitecore DMS you can get the detailed info about each website user, but sometimes it can take a while to retrieve all requested information.
In this article, I'll show how to customize Sitecore, to use GeoLite database for instant country resolving.

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Client Event Tracker - Examples & Demo Page

2011-11-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

My previous blog post about Client Event Tracker module for Sitecore was rather technical and did not contain real examples. Since it's much better to show something once than say about it many times, I've created Demo Page, where you can see how the module can be used, side by side with simple results view.

There are 3 examples, let's review them briefly.

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Sitecore Update Helper

2011-11-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

In this blog post I just want to present my project called Sitecore Update Helper. It's a simple website that helps to prepare to Sitecore CMS update by displaying update steps and links to appropriate pages on SDN.
You just need to specify source / target versions, and click "Process".
This is what you get if you want to upgrade from 6.1.0 Initial Rel. to 6.5.0 Update-1:

If you have any questions or ideas - do not hesitate to leave your comments.

Language Fallback and Sitecore Dictionary

2011-10-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

Sitecore CMS Dictionary is the best place to keep all texts that can be used across the site: "read more", "click here", etc. . It's internal architecture is a little unusual - it stores key/value pairs in the temp file /{yourSiteRoot}/temp/dictionary.dat, which is updated during item:saved event(via the handler in web.config).

Client-Side Event Tracking with Sitecore Analytics

2011-09-26T05:34:00.000-07:00

After the previous blog post about combining JavaScript and CSS, I decided to create more modules standardizing features that can be used out of the box at many websites.

Today I'll describe new module that allows tracking client-side events with Sitecore Analytics. Such feature is really important for today's highly interactive sites, and you'll see how easy it is to implement it for Sitecore.

After installing the module, you'll be able to track external file downloads, Ajax events and any kind of visitor interaction that does not cause the page to refresh (expanding / collapsing page areas, popup windows, etc.).

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Combine and minify JavaScript / CSS in Sitecore CMS

2011-06-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

For a long time I tried to find a solid JavaScript / CSS combining and minifying solution, which is easy to use, extensible and works with Sitecore without need to change sources, etc.
It’s not that hard to create own custom tool, but for many reasons it makes more sense to use actively developed and well-tested project.

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Globe Dashboard Experiment

2011-05-23T09:13:00.000-07:00

While browsing through the Web, I've recently found interesting collection of experimental web apps from Google, built using HTML5, WebGl, and other technologies. I was amazed by the WebGl Globe application - an open platform for geographic data visualization.

Nearly at the same time, Sitecore announced Digital Marketing System 2.0 with optimized analytics API, new dashboards and reports.

Today we'll create a delicious cocktail from newest technologies and tools. Let's take some WebGl and mix it with jQuery, put it into Sitecore DMS and add some DatePickers from jQuery UI. Add a few pieces of WCF Service and transfer into the Shared Source.

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Mobile Device Detector - Performance

2011-03-19T06:27:00.000-07:00

The last blog post about Mobile Device Detector was so popular, that I've decided to post updates and some results of performance profiling without delays.

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WURFL-based mobile device detection for Sitecore CMS

2011-03-08T09:43:00.000-08:00

Mobile web browsing is so popular nowadays, that I was confused by the fact that there is no plug'n'play mobile detection solution for Sitecore and many people still use odd code like "if(userAgent.Contains('iPhone')...".
The best mobile device database is WURFL, and it has a great .NET API from 51 Degrees... so what are we waiting for? Let's create a new module!
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Visualizing Sitecore Roles Inheritance

2011-02-06T23:37:00.000-08:00

Have you ever needed to review the security model of existing website? If yes, then you probably know how to use the Role Manager and "Member of" / "Members" buttons, or extract roles information via API. But how to get the quick summary if there is a hundred of roles? If A1 is a member of A2 where A2 also has members A3, A4, ... Can't imagine? -Visualize it!

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Persona Changer update - testing any personalization rules in a few clicks!

2010-12-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, we've got amazing Shared Source module called “Persona Changer” from Steve Green. Testing personalized websites became much easier in a very user-friendly way.

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Live visitor tracking with Sitecore OMS and Bing Maps

2010-10-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

Real-time information delivery is the one of the most important elements of our online experience. When information being available at the moment it's produced, you can act really quickly and efficiently. That is why the words "live", "instant", "real-time" are so popular in modern web applications.
There are lot of fun apps that show people's tweets, photo galleries on the map, but how about getting similar(and useful) app for your own website?
If it's build on Sitecore, it's incredibly easy. You just need to create a UI and a service that will retrieve your data.

In this post I'll show how to create application that will show Web Forms submissions on your website using Bing Maps.

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Count users online with Sitecore OMS

2010-09-19T00:21:00.000-07:00

When you have a web application, you might want to know how many users are currently online. If you have visited some of web online forums you can see (usually on the first page) the number of currently online users.
This information might be also used to postpone some website jobs if there are too many users online, etc.
How do we know / count how many sessions or users are currently connected to our website in Sitecore?

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Windows Live Writer Integration for Sitecore

2010-09-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

Windows Live Writer is a great tool for blogging. It is simple, fast, and can be customized using plugins written in .NET. You can have web-based interface for adding your blog or articles, but integration with desktop client will not be superfluous as it provides a lot of benefits.
In this post I'll show how to integrate it with Sitecore CMS using MetaWeblog API - an application interface that enables weblog entries to be written, edited, and deleted using web services.

Integration can be divided into two parts:

Implementing MetaWeblog API service members
Creating and configuring various handlers that will tell Live Writer how to find and use our service

Using Coveo with Sitecore. Part 2: Performing a Query

2010-08-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

This post is a part of the "Using Coveo with Sitecore" series.

Indexing Sitecore items
Performing a Query (this post)
Tips and Tricks (snippets, hidden features and real-world examples)

There are many ways to retrieve data from Coveo, I'll describe most popular of them, their proc and cons.

Integrating search interface "as is"
Such integration of Coveo can be implemented in a day or even less, including configuring Sitecore Connector which will crawl only changed / newly created items, adding and configuring front-end search.

In order to add search interface to your website you need to:

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Using Coveo with Sitecore. Part 1: Indexing Sitecore items

2010-08-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

Coveo Search Platform provides a Sitecore package with a module called "Sitecore Connector", which allows you to crawl not just pages, but also content items without presentation, media library, etc. While Connector configuration is described rather well in this document, there are lot of major points that are not enough clear to the programmer who starts using it.

There are lot of things to do with Coveo, so I'll break the whole story into the different blog posts:

Indexing Sitecore items - this post
Performing a query (Coveo controls and custom Query Wrappers)
Tips and Tricks (snippets, hidden features and real-world examples)

Let's begin from creating a Sitecore template that will contain different field types:

Expanding / collapsing Sitecore content tree nodes on double click

2010-08-15T02:56:00.001-07:00

The Sitecore CMS provides very high level of usability, so people without special training can get used to it very quickly. But there is one thing in content tree, that behaves differently in a Windows Explorer. Let's see the following example:

If you double-click on the "Inner folder 1" folder name, it will expand / collapse. But how about Sitecore?

Hmm... double click does nothing, item simply gets refreshed.

Translating Sitecore items using Google Translate

2010-08-07T06:27:00.000-07:00

One of the strongest techniques which can be used to increase sales and get more potential customers of the people from other regions is a multilingual website. Multi-language management is a cornerstone of Sitecore CMS, integrated into all aspects of content and site management. It allows you to build a multi-language website with almost the same effort as a single-language. See this amazing case-study about building website in 28 languages.

But what if you want to translate an existing site with a thousands of pages, hundreds of templates and website sections? How to identify possible architecture(like "Shared" fields that actually should be translated) problems, or implementation bugs (hard-coded texts, displaying item name instead of a title and so on). Sure, you can ask content-editors to spend few weeks in order to translate the site, test it, etc. But how about instant website translation using some online service? Translation quality is not as important when you simply need to identify possible problems after translation, so... let's start!

In this example, I'll use Google Translate as a translation provider. I also tried Bing Translator service, it's almost identical, but does not provide easy API like google-api-for-dotnet.

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Using Sitecore media cache with custom handlers.

2010-08-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

Every certified Sitecore developer knows how media files caching works. When you request image from the media library, you can specify custom parameters like image height, width, scaling, etc. For each parameters set Sitecore stores generated image in the "/App_Data/MediaCache/" folder.

For example, you have a following image in you media library:

/~/media/images/f1

"Set Relative DataSource" action makes total personalization effortless.

2010-07-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Some people say that true personalization is too complex and expensive to set up and maintain, but with Sitecore it's incredibly easy to setup personalization rules, configure rule-based content, etc. In general, to make some personalized content, you should perform the following actions:

Create a personalization rule (add conditions and actions, let's say "Set DataSource" action to point personalized content folder).
Apply it to the rendering or sublayout.

While second step cannot be avoided (unless you use global rules), the first one sometimes looks redundant, as the conditions of the most rules are very similar, especially in location-based ones. The only difference is a DataSource. The main goal of creating "SetRelativeDataSource" action is breaking such dependency and making "clicks only" personalization setup possible.

The idea is following: let the rule control only "personalized" part of the DataSource, taking the "base" DataSource part from the control.

Let's say, you have a lot of sub-trees with personalized content for different controls:

Integrating SyntaxHighlighter with Sitecore's Rich Text Editor

2010-07-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I've noticed that Rich Text Editor is missing "Format Code" button in it's profiles. After initial investigation, I've found that such functionality actually exists, but it's hidden for some reason. To enable it, you should add a new button to the profile (for example, here: /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/Rich Text Full/Toolbar 1) and set it's "Click" field value to "FormatCodeBlock":

If you did everything correctly, you'll get the following button in your Text Editor toolbar:

and default RadEditor's code formatting dialog

The dialog itself looks good but html it's producing is too ugly to be used at modern websites, few lines of code result in 50+ lines of markup like:

div style="BORDER-BOTTOM: #7f9db9 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #7f9db9 1px solid; LINE-HEIGHT: 100% !important; BACKGROUND-COLOR: white; WIDTH: 100%; FONT-FAMILY: Courier New; HEIGHT: 132px; FONT-SIZE: 11px; OVERFLOW: auto; BORDER-TOP: #7f9db9 1px solid; BORDER-RIGHT: #7f9db9 1px solid">

So, I've decided to replace it by very popular Syntax Highlighter module. It has a lot of features, very customizable and looks really nice

keeping the initial markup clear.