Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Sitecore QuickStart Environments

Based on our past experience and from talking to other partners we have realized that partners waste a lot of time repeating the following two tasks:

1) Installing and Configuring Sitecore and various other modules over and over again.
2) Attempting to diagnose issues in Sitecore after applying custom modules and not knowing a what point things broke.

Some of this time could be saved using Sitecore QuickStart Environments.  A Sitecore QuickStart Environment is basic install of Sitecore and/or other modules configured to work with a specifically documented list of changes.  The shorter the list the better.

The idea is that you would start your project by logging into the portal and choose the best QuickStart Environment to meet your needs.  You drop that QuickStart Environment onto your servers make the small modifications and test it works.

Once you have it working in your environment they you can back it up and start adding custom code. If something fails, later you can compare it with the working environment.

Read Watch Create is currently building Sitecore QuickStart Environments for its own use and are working to build out a portal for use by other partners.

If you are interested in assisting in building them or are interested in subscribing to have access to them please email us at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Cassette Bundles not loading when Previewing pages in Sitecore

As you are aware Cassette is an awesome tool to bundle your css and javascripts etc so you can swap it out. However if you are previewing pages that are using Cassette you may notice that some of the calls return blank.

A fellow blog poster has discovered this issue and the solution. You can check out the article Sitecore JavaScript Compression Minification and Less Compilation.  This same blogger has also written this article on Using Cassette bundles with Sitecore MVC

Andrew Davey has submitted the changes to his branch.  You will need to do a get on this branch and then recompile.

Andrew Davey's Cassette Branch

If you are trying to recompile Cassette and get reference errors regarding Iesi.Collection use Nuget Console and it will prompt to restore packages.  After this you will then be able to rebuild.