Waiting Impatiently

xDB.Tracker Identifier Missing

When the xDB.Tracker identifier goes missing.

Are you losing your xDB data?

If you are on Sitecore 9.0 to 9.1.1, and you have no patches, then I am afraid that you are losing data. Here is how you can find out if you are losing data.

Bonfire releases xDB Peek (Part 2)

In part 1, I told you what and why we xDB Peek exists. Now let's break down what the info is and something I am adding soon.

xConnect

Bonfire releases xDB Peek (Part 1)

Our little analytics DTO project is getting all grown up. Now called xDB Peek. An easy to use, styled tool that lets you see everything you need to know about a Sitecore visitor to your web site.

xDB

Add your xConnect facet to Experience Profile, the lazy way

When you start creating xConnect facets, one of the first things you want to do is show them. So you open Google and start your search. Oh joy, I found a 30 step process to do it in Speak. Some time (most times) you want to do it in less than 3 days :)

Sitecore Featured

Working with the xConnect hex identifiers

In the Sitecore 9.x shard databases, the identifiers are hexed. Making it a little harder to query for them. Lets right some sql to do it.

Sitecore Featured

What if I were to tell your the Sitecore.Kernel dll from NuGet isn't the latest??

Sitecore has a knowledge base full of patches and updates that we need for our environments. And how we patch our sites is really important. We need to ensure all sites are equally patched.

xConnect Featured

9.1 Release of the Bonfire Analytics DTO

I have to know what Sitecore is seeing about my user/session. This includes everything from goals, events, profiles, patterns, pages, geo, marketing automation and now xConnect facets.

xDB Featured

Reset a facet on an xConnect contact

In 8.2 it was easy to reset a facet in code using the .Reset() extension on the facet. But in 9.x they removed this making it difficult to clear a facet. Lets fix that.

Sitecore Featured

Using Identity Server and Bearer Tokens to Authenticate Sitecore

In Sitecore 9.1, Sitecore switched the authentication system from ASP.NET Membership to Identity Server 4 with ASP.NET Identity. This allows Sitecore to stop using hand-rolled bearer tokens and start using real industry standardized authentication.

Sitecore

NuGet packages.config is so yesterday

Thats right I said it. I know we have been using the packages config for a long time. But there is a new sheriff in town and its name is project PackageReference.

Sitecore Featured

OH NO! Sitecore hanging after iisreset

Today I had a very strange issue that really took my heart to the limit. This happens, as it always does, at the exactly wrong time. Big weekend for the client, and the site goes unresponsive out of nowhere.

Sitecore Featured

See your xDB marketing data in session

When I was at Sugcon EU recently, I was asking around how developers and marketers were seeing their xDB data, in session. This is seeing the facets, patterns, profile calculations, marketing automation, etc., in the current browser so that you can test your personalization in real time.

Sitecore Featured

Assign profile keys to your content via RULES!

I thought if I could just centralize the profile keys and remove the requirement of assigning profile keys. I could take the work load of the editors and put it on logic using data we already have. So this needed to be on the item level, lets use rules!

Sitecore Featured

How to stop editors from uploading media directly to the server file system

Sitecore has the ability to allow users to upload media files directly to the server instead of the database. When SQL admins want to keep the DB's tidy by keeping the files out of SQL, this is a good option. But when you do, the Ops team is in charge of moving those files between servers.

Sitecore Featured

Install Sitecore like a CI nerd. In minutes.

This Thanksgiving break gives me a chance to document the latest way I have been spinning up Sitecore 9 servers in development. The SIF tool is a very powerful tool, and I am sure I will be using it in CI for the next several years. It lets you configure

Sitecore

Shipping Sitecore Errors to Sentry.io

Best practice for Sitecore ALM is to know when your app is erroring, and if a new deployment is causing the issues. This may not be readily apparent with simple up/down monitors or other online tracking, if the issue is sporadic. So shipping out error logs and getting alerted

Sitecore Featured

Tracking anonymous users in xDB post 8.2 update 3

Sitecore made a pretty big change to the default configs if you are using xDB on your site. By default now, Sitecore will only track users that have been identified in xDB. By "identified," we mean that the user has logged in, clicked a link from ExM, or

xDB Featured

Track, identify and personalize visitors by company

In a B2B scenarios, it is very important to identify the visitors to your website, allowing you to market to that user and track/guide their user journey. There are many ways to do this, including (but certainly not limited to) email campaigns, cookie tracking, traditional marketing campaigns, and IP

Multisite

MediaCachePath for Multisite Site configs

A client that I work with has taken Sitecore and extended it getting max value out of the platform. They use Sitecore to extend a few "Parent" sites into hundreds of child/member sites. This gives the member sites free content from the parent site as well as

Sitecore Azure Toolkit 1.1 Release

Sitecore has announced [https://community.sitecore.net/general/f/13/t/5616] the release of Sitecore Azure Toolkit 1.1. This release brings a few updates. One of them being very important, for customers who have a requirement of being on Azure using PaaS [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_

Using Luke with SOLR indexes

Looking into the index is a must for Sitecore development and creating of custom index fields. What I found along the way was that on my SOLR projects, I couldn't use my trusted Luke installer to look at my SOLR indexes. After some digging around the tracing Luke

Sitecore MVP 2017

When I first started working on Sitecore in 2009 I loved it right away. It had all these building blocks that allowed me to do whatever I wanted. One of the few times in my development life, the software wasn't the limiting factor. It was my imagination that

xDB

Multi-node xDB Facet

Creating an IElementDictionary Facet In my earlier post, I described how to make a single node facet for xDB. This was a simple facet that tracks information about a contact like name, company, location, etc... But now lets take the facet and push it further with a facet that is

Changing templates on items with search and powershell

I recently had an issue where a deployment change had released several items to production where newly created content folders were of the wrong template type. We discovered it late, so there were many of these improper items scattered throughout the content tree. Luckily we have Sitecore PowerShell Extensions [https: