Sitecore Skills

This post describes how to spot a Sitecore solution has become a victim of the  Habitat Cargo Cult , as well as tips to prevent it from occurring. It's part of  a series documenting Helix Smells  - some of the common pitfalls of Sitecore development when following the Helix architecture.

Sitecore recommends caching the HTML of renderings wherever it's practical to do so. Here's a quick SQL script to find View Renderings and Controller Renderings that are not marked as cacheable.

The performance of the Sitecore Content Editor can be affected when an item has too many child items. A rule of thumb is to keep the child count below 100. Here's a quick SQL script to show how many children each item has.

This post describes the  Fat Project  Helix Smell. It's part of a series documenting some of the common pitfalls of Sitecore development when following the Helix architecture.

This post describes how to spot and improve a Helix module that exhibits  Unearned Foundation Status . It's part of a  series documenting Helix Smells - some of the common pitfalls of Sitecore development when following the Helix architecture.

This post describes how to spot and resolve a Fat Foundation module. It's part of a series documenting Helix Smells - some of the common pitfalls of Sitecore development when following the Helix architecture.

"Helix Smell" is the term I use for a sign that there might be a problem within a Sitecore Helix implementation. Each Helix smell has a name and definition. I hope this will provide Sitecore developers with a common vocabulary for discussing issues in their Helix solutions.

It seems like a lot of Sitecore developers struggle with Helix, finding it more of a hindrance than a benefit. Perhaps Sitecore have been too prescriptive in their documentation. Maybe the Habitat example site overwhelms people. Whatever the reasons, I don't think it needs to be that way. If you distill Helix down to its essence, you'll find a collection of 6 architectural principles that were originally codified by Robert C Martin. They're known as the ' Principles of Package and Component Design ' and they're not too difficult to grasp. That said, the language he uses can get pretty complex. So here's my attempt to translate the principles for new Helix developers. Coupling The first 3 principles focus on managing dependencies within your system. Broadly speaking, they help you decide which Helix layer your code should be added to. Stable Foundation / Volatile Project Every Foundation module will probably have lots of dependent Feature/Project...

This is the second in a series of posts looking at the similarities between Sitecore Helix and Domain Driven Design. This time I'll focus on the DDD concept of Bounded Contexts and how understanding them can deepen your appreciation of Helix.

This is the first in a series of posts in which I explore the parallels between the Sitecore Helix architecture and Domain Driven Design (DDD). I think Helix has been heavily influenced by DDD, and a good place to start is to introduce its concept of 'Ubiquitous Language'.

This post describes a scenario where I needed to reuse the configuration of a Sitecore index. I'm not sure how common the requirement is, but maybe you can repurpose it for your own needs.

I recently read an article by Jonathan Robbins about indexing custom xDB facets . While following the instructions in his post I did a little research of my own and found a handy little shortcut.

This quick post provides a fix for an error you might encounter after installing the Coveo for Sitecore package. It occurs when the Sitecore instance in question uses Solr as it's 'main' indexing engine. I got the problem with Coveo for Sitecore 80 4.0 (780) , but I imagine it affects other releases too.

Unlike most posts on this blog I guess this isn't really Sitecore specific. But I'm writing it in direct response to to an article written last year by Sitecore guru Kevin Obee , so I think it's still relevant.

I recently started a thread in the Sitecore MVP forum concerning the best place store page content. I was overwhelmed by the responses. Around 25 MVP's contributed to the thread and I'd like to thank everyone who got involved. In this post I'll summarise the key discussion points.

Once you've created your first Sitecore site, you'll need a way to keep the content under control. This post explains how to use Insert Options to improve you site's information architecture.

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.