Brian Beckham

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]In part 1 I showed you how you can make untrackable MVC and Web API endpoints trackable. Let’s see what we now can do with it.[/su_note] Attribution A little bit of xDB glossary first. A visit is an interaction. A hit is a page. If we just start tracking our MVC and Web API […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]Tracking page visits is easy. It just works. A user visits a page and the analytics pipelines attached to the request processing cycle do their thing. Modern sites and web apps do a lot of dynamic and asynchronous data lookups – they try to provide a better user experience by actively loading partials or […]

101 First things first. To collect analytics you have to make sure you tell Sitecore you are not a robot: Also, if you are running locally you may as well disable robots: Next, if you have a way to identify your users you have to do so explicitly. The site I am working on is […]

An Important Question Setting Imagine that you have a config patch I.Am.The.Only.One.config with: Then for some environments you add Nope.You.Are.Not.config with: You probably wanted it to be: but you forgot. To Be Sitecore can handle a duplicate setting. It will complain on startup: but then it will pick one of the two values and it […]

Sitecore.Services.Client I am currently working on a very unique app. It’s not a traditional Sitecore architecture. Very far from it actually. Data driven, lots of client side renderings over raw data (JSON), dynamically loaded content fragments, and topped with personalization, analytics, and Sitecore playing content as a service role. Very cool I must say. Long […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]A colleague of mine – Maryna Veller – has discovered and diagnosed a very interesting issue with Sitecore’s language resolution on Windows 10. This blog post is the result of her findings[/su_note] Sunny Morning You have a site. Perfectly architected, beautifully built, working like a well oiled machine on Sitecore 8 and Windows 8. […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I am not an operations guy but often my Sitecore backups needs are not sky high either. Maybe you are running a QA environment that your client starts using to play with content population. While that content is not exactly real they would prefer that the content doesn’t vanish overnight. Or maybe there’s a […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I recently had to import various data sets as items into Sitecore. There are many tools one can use but I wanted something very simple, something readily available, and yet something powerful and flexible enough to build a reusable component. I figured I would use Sitecore Powershell Extensions.[/su_note] For a treasure hunt we need […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I have recently found myself working on a project that needed federated authentication. While intrAnet sites could use SiteMinder agent, extranet sites could only do SAML via something like Shibboleth. Setting up a Service Provider with Shibboleth is fairly straightforward and well documented on their wiki. And it also works like a charm until […]

Attribute Routing Rumor has it: you can use MVC attribute routing in Sitecore. It’s actually very easy to set up. John West posted it recently on his blog. Today I stumbled upon an interesting side effect of using this way of routes registration that may be important if your controllers generate user facing experiences that […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]This blog post is a response to a question over at SDN (here). It’s a prototype of a solution, please use at your own risk and make sure you harden the code properly. I intentionally simplified it for the blog post. If I spend a little more time on it I will publish it […]

I assume you have read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series so I won’t explain versioned layouts feature. I will only say that out of the box Experience Editor can only edit Final layout. To modify Shared portion of the presentation details you need Device Editor: Or you can edit the field value […]