Sitecore Content Hub + Glass Mapper = friends?

I've been recently exploring Sitecore DAM (Content Hub) module and installed it on existing website that used Glass Mapper. I followed the installation guide, configured all required properties, updated image field value to use the logo from the Content Hub and... nothing changed at front-end, the hero image was still being served from the media library.

Sitecore.com Continuous Deployment on Azure (2019 Edition)

It's been a while since my previous post about continuous deployment with Sitecore, lots of things have changed since then, www.sitecore.com is now hosted on Azure PAAS, the team is using Azure DevOps instead of TeamCity and much more. Over the past few years we completely revamped our deployment infrastructure and processes, and in this blog post I'll share how our current setup looks like after all of those iterations. Hint: it is now extremely simply and basically configurable in point-and-click manner.

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.

Work less, do more with Sitecore and Microsoft Flow

As a developer who works a lot on integrating different systems with each other I was extremely happy when Microsoft Flow got announced. I've started using it since the early preview and found a ton of ways it could help me automate some tedious tasks with no (or little) coding and be more productive with my daily job.

As a Sitecore developer, I also spend my time building websites on Sitecore platform and integrating them with different systems. It often starts with Save Actions in WFFM module - integrating it with online meetings platform, payment providers, CRM systems.

So what if we could integrate Sitecore with Microsoft Flow and make it the only integration provider you'll ever need? And let the service providers take care of updating their connectors in the cloud, integrating new systems with Sitecore without developers help at all?

Video about Sitecore Courier - basic usage and customizing packaging logic via filters

In this blog post I'd like to share a video which I've created several months ago as an experiment, and finally managed to publish.

The video consists of two parts: presentation and a small demo, in just 10 minutes you'll learn all you need to know about the module and see how to filter unwanted field or item changes by using filters.

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.