rootPath and startItem attribute usege in Sites configuration in Sitecore

Recently, one of my colleagues asked me a question which questioned my knowledged in Sites configuration attributes in Sitecore web.config file

Question:

We have a content tree as follows

When a user visits the http://scfootsteps.local/ , user will be presented with the /sitecore/content/home item, which is the combination of rootPath + startItem in the <sites> configuration

<site name="website" rootPath="/sitecore/content" startItem="/home" ... />


But, what happens if user visits http://scfootsteps.local/aboutus url ?

Answer :

Before degging deeper into this, first refresh our minds with definitions of rootPath & startItem attributes in <sites> configuration

rootPath

The path to the root item of the site in terms of Sitecore content tree. For example, it is set to /sitecore/content for the “website” site.

Quote : https://sdn.sitecore.net/SDN5/Articles/Administration/Configuring%20Multiple%20Sites/Adding%20New%20Site/site%20Attribute%20Properties/rootPath.aspx

startItem

The path to the start Item of the site. This Item will be opened by default when the site is requested. All relative URL paths will be relative to the startItem.

Quote : https://sdn.sitecore.net/SDN5/Articles/Administration/Configuring%20Multiple%20Sites/Adding%20New%20Site/site%20Attribute%20Properties/startItem.aspx

So, that means, anything under the "rootPath" is accessible from typing url.

Question :

Then the next question is, what happens if there are two items with the same name as follows
1) /sitecore/content/aboutus
2) /sitecore/content/home/aboutus

Answer :

Answer is, if item with the same name exists in under both nodes, item inside the /home (i.e. startItem) will get priority

When we delete/remove the item inside the home node (i.e. "sitecore/content/home/aboutus"), item outside the /home node (i.e. "sitecore/content/aboutus" will be displayed for the same url (http://scfootsteps.local/aboutus)

In the next post, we will dig deep into code to see how this above mentioned functionality is handled by Sitecore

happy Sitecore Footsptes  :-)

My Experience on Sitecore IP Geolocation service

Recently we had a task of configuring Sitecore IP Geolocation service with our existing Sitecore website. Even though the configuration is straight forward with good documentation, we were NOT able to configure Personalization to work properly.

i.e.
When we try to add a personalization with GEO IP rules, it didn't detect the country/IP information fro IP Geolocation service
Some sample configurations can be found in the following document
https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore%20experience%20platform/ip%20geolocation/getting%20started%20with%20sitecore%20ip%20geolocation%20service

INSTALLATION

Follow the installation steps in the following document
https://doc.sitecore.net/Sitecore%20Experience%20Platform/IP%20Geolocation/Setting%20up%20Sitecore%20IP%20Geolocation#_Install_and_enable

NOTE :
If you don't have a way to configure your firewall settings to allow requests to the service by domain names, then you need to allow all the IPs for Microsoft Azure Datacenter, defined in the following document

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn175718.aspx

That contains larger number of IPs and they can be changed time to time

TROUBLESHOOTING

If your IP is not getting resolved correctly (or your personalizations are not working correctly), then try to use the 'TestIp.aspx' file in the following kb.sitecore.net artible and try to see if your IP is correction detected by Sitecore IP Geolocation services.

https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/798498


NOTE:
This TestIp.aspx page directly contacts/users GeoIP service and get the necessary data for the requested IP.

That is not the case when this service used in Sitecore website

Quote from doc.sitecore.net
When IP information is requested, the following steps are performed:

• Lookup of IP information in the memory cache;
• Lookup of IP information in the database;
• Request to the Geolocation service.

Quote from Sitecore Support
When IP is resolved, the Geo Data (Country, City, etc) corresponded to the IP is searched in cache and then analytics database. If these storage contain data even incorrect, the service won't be used at all.

So, if you are continuously receiving incorrect information, then it is good to do following steps

1) Check whether the correct IP information is stored in the Analytics database:

• Sitecore 7.5 - Sitecore 8.x: the "GeoIps" collection, Collection database (MongoDB)
• Sitecore 6.4.1 - Sitecore 7.2: the "GeoIps" table, Analytics database (SQL)

And if incorrect Geo location information stared for a given IP, deleted that incorrect IP info from the GeoIps table/collection and do an app pool reset (to clear application cache). 

Correct Geo information will be cached/stored again in the next request.

2) Use proxy client (like Hide My Ass) to change your IP and try with a new IP

Sitecore Config Include Folders

I was looking into how patch file integration working when I found out that, there is another confi include folder defined in the sitecore.kernel.dll code.

Following code was found in the Sitecore.Configuration namespace of Sitecore.Kernel.dll

We all know "/App_Config/Include" folder where we can keep .config files. But, what is this "/App_Config/Sitecore/Components" folder.

"/App_Config/Sitecore/Components" folder does not come by default with fresh Sitecore instance. So, I created the folder structure and try including a test configuration file (test.config) and it worked fine.

Then, I search in the internet for any information about this folder and could not find anything in the following Sitecore documentation that describes about sitecore patching.

https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/60/include_file_patching_facilities_sc6orlater-a4.pdf

But, then I did a search in the sdn.sitecore.net and found following document, which contains a description about the folder path and its usage.

https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sdn5/scrapbook/include%20file%20patching%20facilities.docx

Quote :

6.1 One more “Include” folderSitecore started to take into account one more folder during the initialization. The folder path in the following: /App_Config/Sitecore/Components. This folder is applied before applying the /App_config/Include folder. It does matter if we override settings, which are overridden by other include files.

Hope this helps!

WFFM Subscription Messages to Contact List with Sitecore 8

With Sitecore 7.5 and earlier, when you have WFFM installed, you will see "Subscribe to Recipient List" save action.
When this action is included into a WFFM form, it handles user subscription process.
i.e.
When user submit the form, a Subscription confirmation email is sent with a confirmation link
When the user clicks on that email link, user is added to selected Recipient list & Successful Subscription notification email is sent to the user.

But, with Sitecore 8.0 onward, WFFM does not have such feature built by default.
Off course, you will find "Add Contact to Contact List" save action which allows you to add users to contact list. But, it does not come with the Subscription email handling feature.

We contacted Sitecore support on this and they provide us with an Extended save action, which handles the user Subscription process like it did in earlier versions. (Reference No: 433957)

Sitecore has mention that this will be included in-built into their future WFFM module releases.

Big thanks to Sitecore Support for there hard-work on providing us this functionality.

Hope this helps to someone! :-)

Quick Info Tooltip for Sitecore Content Editor - Sitecore Marketplace Module

Every developer familiar with Sitecore Content Editor knows how irritating when you need to see some info about a another item while you are middle of editing an item.

In this situation, we need to save the currently editing item and then move/select the item that you need to get basic info about (like item path/item id/template id, etc) and come back to the first item which you were editing.

As a solution to this, we introduce Quick Info Tool-tip module, which is a simple and easy module to add into your solution.

Even though the Idea initially came from me, I got lot of help from one of my colleagues, Lakshman Rajapaksha - Sitecore Front-end Developer.

You can download it from following Sitecore Marketplace Url

https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Q/Quick_Info_Tooltip.aspx

Following is an screenshot of the tool-tip

Sitecore User Password Policy Configurations

Today, one of my colleagues had an issue when trying to login to a sitecore backend. Initially, we thought the issue was with some configuration miss-match. But, later one of our colleagues found that we can login to sitecore backend using another user (not Admin user)

We finally came to a conclution that the issue was with the password policy. Since this was little bit new to me, I thought of taking a deeper look on this.

Following Sitecore documents provides few configurations that can be used

Configure password policy - doc.sitecore.net

And following document describes about Sitecore Security

Sitecore Security - doc.sitecore.net

In the above document, Sitecore mention following points which helps us to extend/understand how this works

Sitecore uses the .NET security engine, which offers several advantages:

• A variety of plug-and-play features provided directly by Microsoft.

• An abstraction from the real data source.

• The option to replace or extend the default configuration with custom providers.

• The performance speed of a pure ASP.NET solution.

• The possibility of keeping the accounts in identifiable storage areas by using several providers simultaneously.

So, following are few more configurations that we can used to control the password policies of our Sitecore instance

minRequiredPasswordLength="<int>"
minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="<int>"
requiresQuestionAndAnswer="<bool>"
requiresUniqueEmail="<bool>"
maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="<int>"
 passwordAttemptWindow="<int>"
enablePasswordRetrieval="<bool>"
passwordFormat="Encrypted"
passwordStrengthRegularExpression="<RegularExpression>"

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security.membership_properties%28v=vs.110%29.aspx

Hope this helps.. :-)

Sitecore for Dummies - YouTube Channel - My Sitecore Footsteps

One of my colleague gave me a great idea a year ago. Finally I was able to find some time and motivation to put that idea into reality.

We all get lot of questions/problems while doing our work. Sometimes they are just small things which we don't have to go through 30 minute/1 hour video for find out.
Most of the time, it is just 2-3 minute tasks which we need to learn.

So, for that, here comes "Sitecore for Dummies" youtube channel

The idea behind was to create simple and small (less than 5 minutes) videos which can be used to quickly learn something.

But, if you want to learn something throughly, then there are lot of great videos on youtube like Master Sitecore

I'm hopeful that Sitecore for Dummies videos will help a lot specially for beginners to Sitecore.