Calling all Sitecore Experts. We Want Your Blog Url

December is Sitecore Month at Read Watch Create. We preparing to start the New Year by helping as many people as we can find the information they need to further their Sitecore Learning Journey.  

As a blog author you have written many articles on various Sitecore Topics.  By supplying us your url and the RSS or ATOM feed, you will ensure that people looking for help or information are finding the blog articles you are writing.

Please email your blog url and RSS/Atom Feed url to chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com and we will ensure it gets added to our list.

Why is my site redirecting to RedirectSession.ashx

Problem: I was working on a website using the standard azure url. Then to do proper testing for production we changed the host header to www.mysite.com but when we did that we noticed it was doing a 302 redirect to the azureurl/sitecore/service/analytics/session/RedirectSession.ashx

Solution:  There is a configuration key in the Sitecore.Analytics.Tracker.config. This tells sitecore the host name used for analytics. By changing this setting so the value matches your hostname it will not need to redirect anymore.

<setting name="Analytics.HostName" value="www.mysite.com" />

Thanks Akshay Sura for your assistance. I appreciate it.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources to share with the guild please email them to me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com

Why is my site redirecting to RedirectSession.ashx

Problem: I was working on a website using the standard azure url. Then to do proper testing for production we changed the host header to www.mysite.com but when we did that we noticed it was doing a 302 redirect to the azureurl/sitecore/service/analytics/session/RedirectSession.ashx

Solution:  There is a configuration key in the Sitecore.Analytics.Tracker.config. This tells sitecore the host name used for analytics. By changing this setting so the value matches your hostname it will not need to redirect anymore.

<setting name="Analytics.HostName" value="www.mysite.com" />

Thanks Askshay for your assistance. I appreciate it.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources to share with the guild please email them to me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com

Start The Ignition ... Sitecore Ignition

It is officially out there in beta and I have been dying to talk about it.  My goal for many years has been to reduce the number of rescue projects and strengthen the community through mentoring on best practices and the best tools to get started right.  I have been working on a whitepaper (coming soon) that will assist you in picking the best accelerator for your needs.

At SUGCON last year, I spoke to may regarding the whitepaper and the mysterious 4th accelerator. It haunted me like the 10th insight in the Celestine Prophesy did.  I had to find it.  Eventually I found it and I was so impressed, I became a part of it.

Ignition is the spark that empowers you to own the Sitecore experience. In the Beginning Sitecore was released and it was good.  Then ORMs like Glass Mapper were released and it was better.  Now we are at the dawn of a new era ... Sitecore Ignition.

I am very excited about the release of Ignition. With the growing number of rescue projects, this framework fills a much needed role of helping people new to Sitecore or people starting new projects to get started right.

Start the Ignition!!!

Exception loading Sitecore LaunchPad after running Removing Broken Links on Core Database

If you run the Removing Broken Links tool on the Core Database you will get this error:

The model item passed into the dictionary is of type 'Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingModel', but this dictionary requires a model item of type 'Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Client.Mvc.Presentation.ExperienceAnalyticsLineChartViewModel'

If you do @sitecorey wrote an awesome article on how to fix it.
Sitecore Launchpad exception after removing brokenlinks

Thanks Corey Smith

Perficient, Beachbody and Read Watch Create

You have probably noticed a lot of changes since January 1 so I thought I would explain them to you so you can share in my amazing first quarter of 2016.

Read Watch Create started back in June of 2015 as a vision of building a mentoring community.  Although the website front end is very basic and has grown little, the community has grown both on Social Media, email and offline.  As the New Year approached, the underlying algorithm has grown in complexity and I am currently using it myself separate from the website to help people find articles, videos and people to mentor or implement for them.

With a fresh new year, we expanded our mentoring community to include health and fitness as our CEO became a Beachbody Coach.  I started my fitness journey under her guidance and am now down 9 lbs.  On March 1, I became a Beachbody Coach myself.  We are staring an Accountability Group on May 2. If you are interested send us an email at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com or rebecca.clinch@readwatchcreate.com to join.

Now that April is here, I have started a new full time position at Perficient on the Sitecore Team, mentoring internally while also building out Read Watch Create and its algorithm outside core hours.  I have been very blessed this year as everything is falling into place.

I am very excited about the opportunity at Perficient.  There are a lot of strong and talented individuals, all willing to help each other.  All with their specific strengths that they share.  One of my colleagues just wrote the Coveo Certification Exam and got the highest score to date.

If you are working with Sitecore you need to check out the Perficient Sitecore blog posts.  They are informative and will save you a lot of time.

Testing Accessibility In Sitecore

There are a few tools out there that do Accessibility Reports.  My favorite is AChecker.  This tool allows you to feed it an Url and it will access the site and report all the issues.  Unfortunately, this tool does a single page at a time.

Read Watch Create has a Sitecore Website Report tool that will present you with a list of sites in your Sitecore instance, allow you to choose the report you wish to run, provide you with the results in a DataGrid and allow you to export it as CSV or Excel.

This Web Reports tool currently includes the following reports:

1. Accessibility Checker
2. Media Items stored on file System

If you are interested in obtaining a copy this tool email chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com with your name and contact info including an email that has access to Google Drive.

Sitecore 8.1 and WFFM and Form Data, Oh My

Sounds like something from Wizard of Oz, out of this world.  I love the new architecture for Webforms for Marketers.  I saw the presentation of it at SUGCON in NOLA and it wowed me.

Last night @adamborsi and I got to use it first hand for a client form.  We did run into an issue though. I wanted to put a summary of the results on the thank you page.  I came across an awesome article on how to access Form Data if you are using Sitecore 7.5 or earlier.

However if you are using Sitecore 8.1 then those methods are gone and you MUST use the new more robust provider.  I did some googling and came up with others asking "How do I create an AnalyticsFormsDataProvider"  it had a response so I was excited but unfortunately the response was "Were you able to find the answer to this?"  

Fortunately through a couple hours of trial and error and some googling of the interface names we were able to resolve it.  Here is the sample code:

var provider = new Sitecore.WFFM.Analytics.Providers.AnalyticsFormsDataProvider (new Sitecore.WFFM.Analytics.Dependencies.ReportDataProviderWrapper( Sitecore.WFFM.Abstractions.Dependencies.DependenciesManager.FactoryObjectsProvider), Sitecore.WFFM.Abstractions.Dependencies.DependenciesManager.Logger, Sitecore.WFFM.Abstractions.Dependencies.DependenciesManager.AnalyticsTracker, Sitecore.WFFM.Abstractions.Dependencies.DependenciesManager.Settings); 

foreach (var formData in provider.GetFormData(new Guid("{THIS_IS_YOUR_FORM_GUID}"))) 
{ 
   foreach (var field in formData.Fields) 
   { 
      // You can do what you want here with the field values 
      var fieldValue = field.Value; 
   } 
 }

If you are looking to export you can look at the original article and use that to export. For our purpose we were simply taking the value and summing it and dividing it by entries.

If you have any questions, tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the guild email me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com  

Also, Adam Borsi would like to thank Mike Reynolds (SitecoreJunkie) for all the help he provides through his blogs and twitter.  Much appreciated.





Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training

Are you new to Sitecore? Have you taken the certification training but are still lost?  Akshay Sura and Mike Reynolds have put together a webinar to help.

There are two times based on your timezone to help.  MVPs are already volunteering to present parts of it. Register now as space may be limited.

If you would like to present a topic, reach out to @akshay or @mike_i_reynolds

Would you like a mentor to help you through your deployment?  Let me know chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com