Five things you should know before going live with Azure Search for Sitecore

If you're reading this post, you've probably configured (or about to) shiny new Sitecore 9.x production environment running in the cloud, with Azure Search as a search provider. Not having to worry about Solr Virtual Machine maintenance, Java licensing, etc. is appealing. But it is important to know that Azure Search comes with it's own nuances you might learn the hard way.

Mobile Device Detector - Feature Update

Just a small update on very popular module Mobile Device Detector - it got some new features recently:

1. Some bugfixes - thanks to everyone who reported issues

2. Easier installation: simply install the package, and re-publish content. No need to change web.config files, etc.

3. And, finally, 51Degrees Premium data file support. All properties are avialable. Don't forget, that free version includes only basic set of rules. Advanced rules do not work with free version (bundled with the module).

Expanding / collapsing Sitecore content tree nodes on double click

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

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.