Test multilingual sites with SplitShot

When you develop large multilingual website, it becomes more and more complex overtime, new features added every sprint, new languages and country sites are added qarterly, and it takes more time to verify that your current functionality works fine and a sublayout you're changing for Japan website is not going to break the US or some other multilingual site out of 10+ available.

Clicking through the 15-20 pages every time you change something? Not enough smart.

Sitecore Mobile Device Detector - 51degrees integration

In this quick note I just want to announce that Mobile Device Detector module is now based on 51degrees framework.

Module package includes Lite data library which is free for commercial usage and works really fast.
Previous releases of Mobile Device Detector (based on OpenDDR) are obsolete and will not be maintained, since OpenDDR C# wrapper is rather slow and seems to be abandoned.

Image Placeholder for Sitecore shell

When you create a new website, there are lot of small places for usability improvements in Sitecore shell, which sometimes are not obvious for developers. One of them is Image field dimensions.

The easiest solution is to write some notes in the Title of the field, like "Suggested size - 100x200", but usability of such solution is still not enough good, in some cases it can be unclear - where is width or height, etc.

Sitecore Courier - Effortless Packaging

The first question many Sitecore developers ask when they start thinking about deploying changes with Sitecore is – “How to track item changes?” The deal is - you cannot simply deploy the updated site from version control system (VCS), because production site also holds content items, being constantly edited by content editors, and you need to merge it.

The Story of Automated Deployment

I’m going to tell you the story about automating deployment of large and complex Sitecore project in a real-world.

It all began with a 15-pages document describing website update procedure. There was a huge number of tweaks to website configuration files, machine.config file.

Some were really quick, the other ones could take up to half an hour, for example, creating DB backups, restoring them according to the manual, etc.

New life of Mobile Device Detector

I've recently discovered amazing open-source module for detecting mobile device capabilities, called OpenDDR.
It seems to be the best alternative to the WURFL, and here's why:

Update GeoIp info in DMS database

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.

Sitecore Snippets - Blog Statistics Overview

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.