Sitecore has one of the greatest software communities that I’ve seen. There is a cool slack channel where you can ask and share your knowledge with the community (and also some cool memes 😂).

Also, the marketplace is where you can contribute new modules to extend the features of Sitecore so it gets better and better. What about Reddit? Yes, there is also a subreddit for Sitecore.

Moreover, the Sitecore User Groups, which are organized by members of the community, offer some effective ways to learn and do networking in the place you live. Usually, they are organized using meetups, check the upcoming user groups events in different zones of the world for the rest of the year.

After some feedback from some coworkers, there is an issue at the AddContentEditorExtensions.cs file. The problem is related to the renderContentEditorpipeline that is executed when Sitecore loads the Control Properties dialog.

The Issue-20 was created to track the problem. The issue is already fixed and new version v0.0.2.1 was released. It should be available in the Sitecore Marketplace in the next days. 

https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/S/SitecoreExtensions.aspx

Please, take a look and create a new issue if there is a new problem.

You have probably used Glass.Mapper.Sc in your projects. You probably have used it with Sitecore TDS to generate the code that maps your templates and renderings of the coolest sites you created. Glass.Mapper.Sc has saved me a lot of time and headaches during the last years.

I remember when I started to learn Sitecore and had to map the templates using string constants and GUIDs to maps the fields of my new templates, and then use Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem, and THEN, cast the item to an object that was easier to handle.

Recently, I had to upgrade a Sitecore 8.1 instance to Sitecore 9.1. After some changes in the code, including the updating of the GlassMapper calls, the site showed up and everything seems to be working fine. However, I noticed that every time that a DLL was deployed, making Sitecore restart, the application took like 5 minutes to load.

Initially, I thought that something was going on with one or more components that I just installed. After checking the logs, I didn’t find any ERROR or WARN lines that suggest the cause of the problem, although I saw some INFO lines regarding a job that started multiple times

Recently, I had to deal with an issue related to the creation of a user’s contact in the Sitecore XDb, and wanted to share more details on how the problem was solved.

For some reason, the user creation process failed the first time, then, when the user tried to register again, the process failed at the following lines.

ERROR Error Happened while creating a user
Exception: System.InvalidOperationException
Message: An element with the specified key already exists.
Source: Sitecore.Analytics.Model
   at Sitecore.Analytics.Model.Framework.ModelDictionaryMember`1.Create(String key)
   at Sitecore.Analytics.Model.Framework.ModelDictionaryMember`1.ElementDictionary.Create(String key)
   at Sitecore.Commerce.Pipelines.Customers.CreateContact.CreateContactInXDb.AddFacets(Contact contact, CreateUserResult createUserResult)
   at Sitecore.Commerce.Pipelines.Customers.CreateContact.CreateContactInXDb.Process(ServicePipelineArgs args)
   at (Object , Object[] )
   at Sitecore.Pipelines.CorePipeline.Run(PipelineArgs args)
   at Sitecore.Pipelines.DefaultCorePipelineManager.Run(String pipelineName, PipelineArgs args, String pipelineDomain)
   at Sitecore.Commerce.Pipelines.PipelineService.RunPipeline[TArgs](String pipelineName, TArgs args)
   at Sitecore.Commerce.Services.ServiceProvider.RunPipeline[TRequest,TResult](String pipelineName, TRequest request)

Initially, I checked the Contacts collection in the MongoDb, but the user with the reported email was not there. At that point, I started to suspect that the issue was actually something related to how the user sessions are handled by Sitecore.

This post is a second part about the URL Rewrite Module that I described in a previous post URL Rewrite Module for Sitecore, part 1. This post will cover the creation of some useful inbound rules

Inbound rules creation

As we mentioned in the previous post, inbound rules allow setting a regular expression to match on the path of a URL that will be handled rewrite module.

According to the Sitecore community documentation, “a view rendering is the simplest Sitecore MVC rendering type. As with all presentation items in Sitecore, a view rendering consists of a definition item in Sitecore and a file on the file system.” 

By default, the view rendering will have access to the current page. The .cshtml view has to use the RenderingModel class as the default model. The view can look like this:

Today, Microsoft just released a Microsoft Edge Insider Channels page where you can download the latest version of this new browser entirely based on Chromium.

The page offers two different channel versions. The Canary Channel version is automatically built every night and may have some defects. The Dev Channel version is released every week, and the Edge team tests it. Therefore, it is more stable than the Canary version. 

This new browser was customized to use the Microsoft services where possible. For instance, the search engine by default is Bing which may not be your choice for searching every day. Fortunately, you can change it by visiting the Settings page at edge://settings/search. You may have to visit the Google home page, so Edge detects that there is a search engine available.

When the content of a page has expired or it is not relevant anymore, and a new version is available in a different URL, it is common that the web administrator creates rules so the old URL redirects to the new content URL.

One IIS module used to do this task is the IIS URL Rewrite which allows creating rules to generate URLs that can be easier for users to remember, simple for search engines to index, allow URLs to follow a consistent and canonical hostname format, and also redirect to a new URL.

After almost seven years working with Sitecore, I decided to start a small project which the primary purpose is to create a set of improvements for the Sitecore user interface that I realized that could be useful for developers and content editors. I have a list of features that I would like to develop during the next months, and I planned to deliver at least one per month. 

This project is an open source project available at https://github.com/andresvillenas/Sitecore.Extensions. Currently, this project is under development, and it is not available in Sitecore Marketplace yet. However, there is already a single feature developed completely: JumpList.