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.

EXM 3.1 for Sitecore CMS 8.0 Update-3 Upgrade Note

Recently Sitecore relase a new version of Email Experience Manager - EXM 3.1 rev. 150703 for Sitecore 8.0 rev. 150427

This EXM version includes drastic changes from its earlier version, like moving dispatch queue into SQL database instead of MongoDB, etc

I tried to upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1 and the process went smoothly except in one occation.

When tried to run the Update Installation Wizard with the EXM 3.1 Update file (Email Experience Manager 3.1 rev. 150703.update), at the end of the installation process, it returned a critical error stating a .js file deletion failed error.

But, I later found in the upgrade documentation (EXM 31 Update Instructions.pdf) that, they are asking to manually deleting this file and its containing folder.

Remove the following files from all instances of EXM :
sitecore\shell\client\Applications\ECM\EmailCampaign.Client\Pipelines\UpdateMessagevariant\UpdateVariant.js
sitecore\shell\client\Applications\ECM\EmailCampaign.Client\Pipelines\UpdateMessagevariant

How to change the tool/profiles used as the Rich Text Field Editor in Sitecore

Today we will discuss about the Rich-Text fields.

How to change the tool/profiles displayed as the Rich Text Field editor

1. Login to Sitecore Desktop
2. Change the database to "Core"

          

      3. Open "Content Editor"
      4. Under the "/sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles", you will see different profiles for the editor.

         

       5.  Select the preferred profile (or create a new profile with the properties/tool tips that you want) and copy the path of that item.
As for my example, I have selected the "Rich Text Full" editor profile and copied the path of that item
/sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/Rich Text Full

       6.  Change the database back to "master"
       7.  Open the "Content Editor"
       8.  Select the Rich-Text type field of the template that you need have the Rich Text Editor
       9.  In the "Source" field, enter the path of the Editor Profile that you copied from the Core database.
            /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/Rich Text Full

       10.  Now, when you click the "Show Editor" button for an item created from the above template, you will get the full tool tip options.