Sitecore Skills

This post documents Sitecore's  DetermineInteractionChannel  pipeline, and is part of a series providing information on  all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

This quick post provides information about the sitecore_suggested_test_index, which I have found to be problematic in some large Sitecore 8.x implementations.

Sitecore 8.1 is released this week and with it comes a couple of major improvements to the behavioural profiling system. This post makes an initial exploration of these new features and the mechanics underpinning them.

I am an idiot. I'm writing this post in case you're an idiot too. It concerns a nasty looking, but ultimately harmless error in Sitecore 8's Experience Analytics screen that caught me out more than once.

This post documents Sitecore's  ParseReferrer  pipeline, and is part of a series providing information on  all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

Here's a quick one that might help if you have a Sitecore instance that is not clearing its HTML cache after you publish. I encountered this problem recently. The most confusing part was that it was only occurring on one of the two content delivery servers, despite them having identical configurations.

This post documents Sitecore's  CreateVisit  pipeline, and is part of a series providing information on  all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

Have you noticed that when you publish one item in a single language Sitecore reports "Processed: 2"? Did you know that every time you publish, Sitecore secretly processes some items you didn't ask for? This is actually a feature designed to maintain the integrity of your content and that's obviously a good thing, but in practice I've often found it to be overkill. This post explains why Sitecore includes this behavior and should help you decide whether or not to disable it.

Solr is fast becoming the preferred search technology within Sitecore. When it first became an option in Sitecore 7, I remember Google Hangouts and user group discussions about how Solr supported the ability to combine multiple Sitecore indexes into one Solr core. At the time I didn't understand the significance of this, but I now realize it's quite important.

This post documents Sitecore's  TrafficTypes  pipeline, and is part of a series providing information on  all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

That might seem like a controversial title for a Sitecore blog. After all, datasources are accepted as being essential for building successful Sitecore sites. Don't worry, I'm a strong advocate of using datasources. If they aren't central to your approach, then you probably haven't grasped just how powerful Sitecore can be.

This post provides some basic notes on the properties and methods of Sitecore Explore mode's   PageModelHelper class. It's part of an ongoing series  taking a deep dive in to this feature.

Recently, I was getting this error in one of our Sitecore 7.5 instances: ERROR Failed processing expired items. Session type: d027da82-f6a4-4275-bb09-8bd3732d828e Transaction (Process ID 127) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

This post documents Sitecore's  ExcludeRobots  pipeline and is part of a series providing information on  all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

This post is an overview of the properties and methods of Sitecore Explore mode's ModuleManager class. It's part of an  ongoing series  taking a deep dive into this feature. For more general information on Explore Mode, read my  introductory post .

This post give's an overview of the configuration associated with Explore Mode (formerly the Experience Explorer) in Sitecore 8. It's the first in an  ongoing series taking a deep dive into this feature. For more general information, read my introductory post .

In Sitecore 8, the Experience Editor has an "Explore mode". It allows Sitecore users to impersonate visitors to their website, and provides an easy means of experimenting with marketing features to see how the site would behave in different scenarios.

This post documents Sitecore's  CreateTracker  pipeline, and is part of a series providing information on  all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

This post documents Sitecore's StartAnalytics  pipeline, and is part of a series providing information on  all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

This post documents Sitecore's  StartTracking pipeline, and is part of a series providing information on all the pipelines and processors in involved in a Sitecore 8 request . It's not a line by line account, but all the key logic is described.

I have compiled a list of every pipeline and processor in Sitecore 8 that runs directly as a result of an HTTP request and presented them in the order they occur.

I've previously written about my interest in experimenting with Sitecore's SiteProvider , and I'm pleased to see that a new class has been introduced in Sitecore 8 that helps with that.

I have been lucky enough to be named a Sitecore Most Valued Professional (MVP) for 2015. It's an award given to those who have been recognised as making an exceptional contribution to the Sitecore developer community in the last year.