If you are using Sitecore Form, probably you have the need to extend the SubmitAction… this code snippet is a good example to start creating a custom SubmitAction…
The simpler custom submit action could be used to save data on a log file, and maybe send an email with the data submitted in the form…
Other common scenarios for custom actions are integrating it with the CRM….
This example has been tested with Sitecore 9.02 and should work well also with other versions up to 9.2….
happy forms!
Unfortunately this year I have not eXperienced Sitecore Symposium in person but I have done my best to follow all the news via Twitter and here there is my take away of the big news announced and the take away for everybody who works with Sitecore…
This is a big change for Sitecore that will be available on-premise, PAAS on Azure, SAAS and probably in the future hosted in a container/Docker… expectations for Sitecore SAAS are very high… will I stop writing Power shell, install and upgrade Sitecore? time will tell…
read more about the announcement
2. Sitecore 9.3 has been announced
this was expected news, the release date summer is 2020 (something will be included in a winter release) and main changes should be:
3. Stellar guests, once more Sitecore lined up impressive speakers such as Magic Johnson and Scott Guthrie
Other news:
Next year Symposium will be hosted in Chicago 26-29 October 2020
As most of Sitecore developers I quickly fall in love with Helix base solution approach but when it comes to developer experience Gulp was not feeling like the best match for build and deployment neither on my local machine…
As you have probably experienced, getting Gulp up and running is pretty simple, but as you start adding projects and complexity to your solution the build time increase exponentially and I have seen solutions where the Gulp build task taking more than 20 minutes, compared to 1-2 minutes of a standard Visualstudio build & publish command….
Therefore my idea to use Powershell even to deploy on my local machine for a full build and publish of my solution locally…
The idea is to hook in the full build and publish of all the projects on the publish of the main website project…
In reality, the code to achieve it, it is pretty simple and you can get it to work pretty easy since you need to worry only about three areas:
As additional steps, you may consider including the Unicorn or TDS synchronisation to replicate what you do within Gulp but personally, I like to run manually all the items synchronisation to keep closer control and have quicker build and publish time…
Few things to do to get it running:
1. Install prerequisites
IIS Management Script and Tools must be enabled from ‘turn windows features on or off’
2. Copy the powershells script and powershell config in the website – configuration folder
You need these two files from my Gist: https://gist.github.com/steliodibello/4cb47563ce43b922b943a000ec072853
remember to replace XXX with your project name
3. Amend the main webiste project to invoke the powershell on the after build step
<Target Name=”PublishAll” AfterTargets=”CopyAllFilesToSingleFolderForPackage”>
<Exec Command=”powershell.exe -NonInteractive –ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -command "& { &’$(SolutionDir)Configuration\PostPublish.ps1′ -solutionPath ‘$(SolutionDir)’ } "” />
</Target>
For further reference and similar blogs who have inspired mine, have a look at:
https://www.onceinawhitemoon.net/2019/04/automatically-deploy-all-sitecore-helix-projects/
and
https://whipeter.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/sitecore-helix-build-and-deploy-powershell-script/
I am glad to blog about the improvements in the Developer experience installing Sitecore 9.2… in case you have installed already Sitecore 9, you were probably aware of the pain and joy related to it… With Sitecore 9.2 luckily most of the misery is gone and installation is simpler and easier….
Windows 10
Not sure which version I have, but certainly, help to have Powershell 5.1 and have an administrator account
SQL server
I went for SQL 2017 Developer edition and a fresh instance dedicated to Sitecore…
As additional configuration steps, remember to enable mixed authentication and do a SQL sysadmin account to install and run your sitecore setup and DB
In addition, I have enabled Contained Database authentication
SOLR
you need to go for version 7.5 I have used this PowerShell script which Peter Prochazka explains in his blog post. I went with OpenJDK and everything went smooth since no other Java version was present on the laptop
Running the script in an elevated powershell session the magic happen and I had Solr 7.5 up and running.
this was the best surprise I can find… Graphical setup package for XP Single that you can download from https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Sitecore_Experience_Platform/92/Sitecore_Experience_Platform_92_Initial_Release.aspx
will do the boring job for you… In case you had installed Sitecore 9, you are aware of the long list of prerequisites to install (configure IIS, certificates, packages etc) SIA actually do 99% of it on your behalf, downloading and installing and setting all the prerequisites on your behalf…
The only parameters to provide to SIA will be the SOLR url: https://solr75:8750/solr and sql instance name and credentials….
installing prerequisites quietly
fill in some settings such as instance name, admin pwd (I always put b…) and license file location
sql instance details… I recommend not to use sa account but a sql sysadmin account…
and finally
This is one of my top tricks on Sitecore…
Sitecore comes OOB with Publish Site feature, but in reality, a “normal” content author will never need that button, and within my personal experience, several times Sitecore Administrators have forgotten that button enabled, and Content users have published the site thinking to publish a single Sitecore item….
Therefore my recommendation is to remove the permission of Publish Site button for standard content authors to avoid performance issues and avoid unrequired issues…
The simpler way to remove the Button is via permission at the following path within the three….
Hello!
As you probably are aware within Sitecore 9, WFFM was deprecated and Sitecore Form was introduced…
On the base that I do not particularly believe in Marketers building forms, I had fun migrating a few simple forms as part of the migration that I was running, but I do not think that would be an achievable task for dummy content editors/marketers…
First challenge come with the list of forms, on Sitecore 9, I had to rebuild indexes few times to get the valid list of my Sitecore forms (this KB will help you… https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/891856 in my case my user was messing around with languages)
Form Elements are the common elements that you will use and 90% will be basic form elements https://doc.sitecore.com/users/91/sitecore-experience-platform/en/the-basic-elements.html
Styling a form, in theory, is really simple, see the image:
but in practice, if you need to change the markup, and in my experience, you will have to, the simpler way is going and editing directly the CSHTML of the view… You can find these files in Views/FormBuilder/FieldTemplates
But obviously, you are free to extend your own fields, here you can find further information on how to do it: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/sitecore-experience-manager/en/walkthrough–creating-a-custom-form-element.html
Once you have created your first Sitecore form, it is time to add it to your page…
Your page MUST have an MVC Layout, and then you can use a Form Rendering…
In the case you did not know, Sitecore 9.1 initial version has just been released, you can download it from:
and that’s what you need to know to consider upgrading to this version:
Key improvements:
I have just installed it and it is hard to say my favorite one, but if I have to pick one, is certainly around CORTEX feature and what will allow developers and marketers to achieve… I have also heard very positive feedbacks on performances improvements and that’s good to see the product evolving in the right direction…
you can read more about Sitecore 9.1 from Pieter’s blog here: http://www.pieterbrinkman.com/tag/sitecore-9-1-whats-new/
