Sitecore Courier is now available at Chocolatey Gallery

I'm excited to announce that the Sitecore Courier module is now available at Chocolatey Gallery - https://chocolatey.org/packages/sitecore-courier! This is the first Sitecore-related Chocolatey package and it also contains a few improvements to the tool.

From now, all you need to install Sitecore Courier is to type choco install sitecore-courier in command line or PowerShell console.

Path to Sitecore.Courier.Runner.exe will be added to the environment variables, so that you'll be able to run it from the command line as well.

One more thing - it will register a shell extension that allows easy packaging of both items and files. Try it out - that's a great time saver. Simply right-click any folder and choose "Package with Sitecore Courier" option. (You might need to restart your computer before this option appears).

That's it, enjoy! If you've got more suggestions on improvements - please report them here or at GitHub - https://github.com/adoprog/Sitecore-Courier.

[Pro]Active Sitecore Monitoring

When you hear the words "Application Lifecycle Management", the first thing that comes into your mind is likely Build / Deploy / Test workflow. But there is one thing which is missing here, and it is called "Monitoring".

Once you've deployed the website, you'll see that website performance may vary a lot depending on many known and unknown factors. They can be caused by both external (such as bot traffic, daily visits spikes, membership providers (CRM, AD) performance) and internal (different Sitecore jobs, scheduled tasks, automations, etc.) factors.

How do you know how the website performs? It's not something that you'll find in Sitecore logs, and it's not one hundred percent clear from IIS logs either.

Translating Sitecore with Smartling

Few years ago, I wrote a blog post about Sitecore Language Translator module, which worked using Google / Bing translations API. It was probably one of the first Sitecore modules which allowed automated website translation (even though it could be used only for testing). Since then, I've tried out a lot of translation modules, as website translation is required in at least 90% (just my rough guesstimate) of the projects where Sitecore is used.

That's why I was really excited when a friend of mine, who works at New York-based startup called Smartling, has sent me the latest version of their Sitecore Connector which I'll briefly (just showing off the most interesting features) review in this blog post.

Let's build Sitecore Open Source with TeamCity

Over the past few years I've been focusing on applications life cycle as one of the key areas of my daily job. I've also spent some nights creating Sitecore PowerCore, Sitecore Courier, and many other build/deploy/test related tools. But one of the projects has always been postponed for different reasons. The project I'd like to share is a build playground which you can touch & feel, and it is built using my favorite tools:

• TeamCity
• Sitecore PowerCore 
• Sitecore Courier
• and some more

Packaging files with Sitecore Courier

It's been a long time since Sitecore Courier was released, I've got a lot of feedback about it, so now it's time to add the next major feature to it: files packaging support.

Initially, the module could handle only items, which was just enough for deploying item changes to your website on release day. But at some point I've realized that it can also replace standard Sitecore Package Designer, providing some additional benefits, which I'll list below.

(Auto) Configure your Web Server for Sitecore

In the past people used to install Sitecore manually extracting files from archive, setting up permissions according to the installation guide, etc. It sounds so wrong today, when we have PowerCore Deployment Framework, Sitecore Instance Manager, etc. But setting up website is not just about Sitecore deployment, if you look around, you'll see that you also need to configure the environment around it. And here's the simple way to do it.