Sitecore DMS Personalization Out of Box Conditions List

Someone asked for the out-of-box conditions that can be applied during Personalization.
A simple look in the content tree allowed me to create a list.

You can find the list in the content tree at: /sitecore/system/Settings/Rules/Conditional Renderings/Conditions

Below is the list I found:

Automation State

* Has Automation

* Has Automation State

Classifications

* Visitor Identification Condition

Events

* Has Goal Condition

Geo IP

* Area Code Condition

* City Condition

* Country Condition

* DNS Condition

* IP Address Condition

* ISP Name Condition

* Keywords Condition

* Latitude Condition

* Longitude Condition

* Metro Code Condition

* Name Condition

* Postal Code Condition

* Region Condition

Profiles and Patterns

* Has Pattern Condition

* Profile Condition

Referrers

* Has Keywords Conditions

* Traffic Type Condition

* Visitor Tags

* Has Visitor Tag Condition

* Visitor Tag Condition

Visits

* Engagement Value Points Condition

* Global Visit No Condition

* Has Campaign Condition

* Has Visited Page Condition

* Page Index Condition

Hope this helps others looking for this information.  If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like shared with the guild or you have any questions please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Remove ashx extension in Sitecore media item urls

I found this article referenced on a LinkedIn Group and thought I would share it with the guild.

When developing your web applications, rather than having the item extension be ashx, if you make a simple web.config change you can keep the actual extension.

Check out the article on how to Remove the ashx extension in urls for media items in Sitecore and use the real type extension for the media items IE jpg, gif, etc

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like shared with the guild please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Getting Started with Sitecore DMS

There is a lot of buzz about Sitecore DMS and Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform. A lot of people are looking for good tips, tricks and resources on both.

First of all I would like to point out that John West has a brief but detailed section describing some of the terms and fundamental concepts on DMS in his book Professional Sitecore Development.

After reading this section, I recommend checking out the article Sitecore DMS - Where to Start Part 1. This will help you with getting started.

Next I suggest this article that talks about the Integrated-Customer-Experience

Sitecore also offers the following training DMS Fundamentals for Marketers. This one is in Toronto on July 27, 2012 but if you look at the training section there are other dates and other cities where the training is offered.

After that I suggest logging into sdn and checking out some of the valuable references there.

If you have any further articles you would recommend, tips, tricks, pitfalls to avoid related to getting started with Sitecore DMS or Sitecore in general, please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com and I will post them here.

Sitecore MVC the topic of latest Sitecore Virtual User Group July 18

The Sitecore Virtual User Group on July 18, 2012 is on Sitecore MVC this time.

I am looking forward to this presentation. MVC is a hot topic and now that it is part of Sitecore in the 6.5.1 release this is very exciting.

You can register here for the Sitecore Virtual User Group.

In case you missed this awesome presentation by David Morrison, he has posted it on
YouTube

New Dynamics CRM Blog

For those Guild Members who are looking at Dynamics CRM or are looking at revolutionary and out of the box ways of getting the most out of it, there is a new blog starting up that will be providing a wealth of information on just those topics.

The Dynamics CRM Unleashed Blog is written by someone with hands on experience working with large scale and cloud based CRM.

I know I will be reading it on a regular basis, so I thought I would pass it on to you as well.

For now, here is an article I found from Alex de Groot on Sitecore and CRM Integration using Web Forms for Marketers. Check out his article: Sitecore, Webforms for Marketers, OMS and Dynamics CRM Campaign integration for more details.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the Guild please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Sitecore and Document Oriented Databases

I recently came across this article on Making Sitecore faster with MongoDB. I tried it out on one of or development servers and for text based content items it worked fine for me. I am having issues when I try to upload a Media Library image but that may just be configuration. If you have run into this or have any ideas why it is not uploading, please email me or comment on this post for what I am doing wrong.

Trying this out started me thinking about MongoDB vs other document oriented database.
According to this article on Initial Thoughts on Ravendb. Rumor has it that Sitecore 7.0 will support RavenDB.

Has anyone been playing with RavenDB and Sitecore?

Someone recently tweeted an article on massive. Does anyone have any more information on it.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources that regarding Sitecore and Document Oriented Databases please comment on this post or email sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Slow Page Load and Missing Placeholders and Properly hiding SubLayouts

Sometimes when developing a page, you need to remove a sub-layout from a page temporarily.  It is very tempting to rename the placeholder to a non-existing placeholder sometimes simply putting an x or zzz on the end.  This will work to hide the items but you will get a performance penalty of 1.6 ms.

A better way to do this is simply clear the Placeholder field.  When rendering Sitecore will skip sub-layouts where the placeholder field is empty but if you place anything in the placeholder field then Sitecore must look in the layout or sub-layouts for the placeholder.  

If this does not solve your issue with the page loading then the other option is the Sitecore Debug.

If you login to the Sitecore Admin in Desktop view you will see a Debug menu option in the Sitecore Menu.

Clicking on it will open the site in debug mode.  Navigate to the slow page.  Once it loads scroll down and you will see the breakdown of components loading.  As well if you scroll down further you will see a trace.  Sometimes you will see warnings in the trace and this may solve your problem.  This is how I found and solved the missing placeholder issue.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com

The First Sitecore Development book scheduled for release May 29, 2012

As a Sitecore Developer I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Professional Sitecore Development By John West especially after seeing the following in the Amazon description.

• Addresses installing and configuring Sitecore.
• Touches on some of the more advanced features of Sitecore, including other APIs, pipelines, and configuration files

Once you have your own copy I would love to hear comments on parts of the book that helped you as they may direct others that have similar needs.

While we wait for the book release please check out his blog at John West - Sitecore Blog there is a lot of really useful information.

Toronto Sitecore Technical User Group is Meeting May 30, 2012

These user group meetings are great places to meet others working with Sitecore and to learn some new things
as well.

Here are the details:

Toronto Sitecore Technical User Group - May 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM (ET)
Toronto, Ontario

Click here to register.  Look forward to seeing you there.

Sitecore 6.2 and Change Password link on Login Page broken

I found in an installation of Sitecore 6.2 that the Change Password link on the Login page was broken.
Instead of going to sitename/sitecore/login/changepassword.aspx it was going to sitename/sitecore/changepassword.aspx

The fix is to look in the \Inetpub\wwwroot\sitecore\Website\sitecore\login folder and open the ChangePassword.aspx page.  Search for "ChangePassword" Change the a href to read:


<a class="LoginOption" href="login/changepassword.aspx">Change Password</a>

This will resolve the issue and you will get the change password page.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the Guild, please email sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Installing Glass

For fans of SkyRim you may know that Glass is the weapon of choice.  In the Sitecore Realm the same applies.

Glass Sitecore Mapper is an object mapping framework for mapping Sitecore items directly onto an object model allowing you to model your entire Sitecore solution as a data model. The framework handles converting data to and from fields and pulling data from related items.

Instructions to install Glass

1. Join the Glass Google Group.  Its the place to go for support:
   
2. Install Powershell 2.0 if you don't have it already.
   It is available at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968929
   
3. Install NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio. Available at:
   
   http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/27077b70-9dad-4c64-adcf-c7cf6bc9970c
   
   
4. The following link provides detailed information on installing NuGet:
   
    http://docs.nuget.org/docs/start-here/installing-nuget
   
   
5. Make sure you open your solution in visual studio you want to install glass on.
   
6. Install Castle.Core from Nuget using "Install-Package Castle.Core"
   This is required because Glass is build upon these base classes.
   
7. Install Glass from Nuget using "Install-Package Glass.Sitecore.Mapper".
   If it installs correctly go to step 9.  If not check step 8 below.
   The following link has more information on how to do this:
   
    http://www.glass.lu/?page_id=462
   
   
8. When installing the package you may get an error like the following:
   

   Could not install package 'MostAwesomePackageEvar 1.0.0'. You are trying to install this package into a project that targets '.NETFramework,Version=v3.5', but the package does not contain any assembly references that are compatible with that framework. For more information, contact the package author.

        Don't fret it just takes a manual step.
   
   •  Click on your project and click on the reference to Castle.Core
   • Right click and click on properties.
   • Copy the reference path.
   • Remove the reference and attempt to re-add it by pasting the path you copied but remove the filename.
          Navigate up a directory and choose the net40-client directory.  You will end up with a path ending in \packages\Castle.Core.3.0.0.4001\lib\net40-client\Castle.Core.dll
   • Redo the install in step 6
9. Visit The Glass Google Group and Glass.Sitecore.Mapper Wiki and read up on usage.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the Guild please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com

Sitecore custom error pages

In ASP.NET its as simple as a single web.config key (customerrors), but for Sitecore there
are a few added steps that need to be done like making sure your page is in the ignoreurls and
changing the other Sitecore Custom Error settings.

I found a really good article that walks you through this step by step:

Sitecore Custom Error Pages

If you have any tips, tricks, articles or resources you would like to share with the guild,
please email them to sitecoreguild@outlook.com or post them as comments.

The security settings for the current language prevent you from seeing this item. To continue, select another language from the Language drop-down list on the Versions tab.

I saw a few blog posts on this error but took me a while to figure out what the real solution was.  Here is a description of the error and how to resolve it.

Problem: A user is assigned access to edit content in the Content Editor but when they click on an item to edit they get the following error:

The security settings for the current language prevent you from seeing this item.
To continue, select another language from the Language drop-down list on the Versions tab.

Reason: In the content editor on the Master database there is a folder  at /system/languages
This folder has a new security key called language:read and language:write.  By default this is assigned to sitecore\everyone.  This is fine provided that only local users are accessing the content editor but if you are using ad domain\everyone will be default be denied.

Solution: Click on security and access viewer.  Navigate to /system/languages.  click on assign and assign the {your domain}\everyone access to language:read and language:write.   If you want to do this for a specific language you can open the folder click on the language and set these access properties there.