Sitecore – Hidden Gems

Unleash the Potential of Power Platform With a Center of Excellence

Business innovation often comes from within. Discover how to empower innovation from non-traditional developers with the Microsoft Power Platform.

Learn More

Recently I was working with Sitecore Support to resolve an issue that I was running into with a page. During the process they asked me to generate a package of the item from the \admin page. I’ve been working with Sitecore for a few years and used things like the \admin\showconfig.aspx page. But I’ve never navigated directly to \admin. To my surprise, there’s a whole collection of tools linked to by this page and will be very helpful in the future if I can’t remember the name of a tool, or don’t want to type out ‘UpdateInstallationWizard’ again.

The ‘Package Item’ link is especially useful because it will package up all of the item’s dependencies and references, all I had to do was provide a starting location (the problematic page) and it generated a package containing all of the renderings and templates associated with the page.
I also want to point out another area that used to be included in the Sitecore Desktop’s options, but was removed shortly before version 8. Specifically, I was missing the XPath Builder and File Viewer. These can still be accessed by providing a specific path and querystring value after the Sitecore instance name. This information came from Robbert Hock’s (@kayeeNL  on twitter) post found here.
XPath Builder = <instance name>/sitecore/shell/default.aspx?xmlcontrol=IDE.XPath.Builder

File Viewer = <instance name>/sitecore/shell/default.aspx?xmlcontrol=FileExplorer

The File Explorer tool has been especially handy lately as it allows me to look at the contents of the Website folder, without needing access to the server file system. Sometimes, getting access to file system is not possible due to client security restrictions and this is where the file explorer within Sitecore is very useful.
 
Hopefully this is useful!