How to audit Sitecore project quickly

It’s always a challenge for Architects to audit the Sitecore based projects.

Sitecore Audit

One should always follow best practices described by Sitecore. But still there are many occasion where development team itself can self-audit their project especillay on CM, CD and production environment.

Team can use great tool Sitecore Diagnostic Toolset for this audit purpose.

You can download this tool from Sitecore Marketplace.

Steps to run this tool

Double click on downloaded tool

Welcome screen

Select your Sitecore instance

Select Sitecore instance

Run against Environment like CM, CD etc.

Select environment

Click on generated link to view the report

Report Link

Check generated HTML Report for errors.

Generated report

One should focus on errors and warnings in this reports.

That’s it. Simple and straight forward solution. 

I hope you like this Sitecore lesson. Stay tuned for more Sitecore related articles.

Till that happy sitecoring :)

Please leave your comments or share this article if it’s useful for you.

Lifetime and publishing in Sitecore

This post is about lifetime and publishing fields of an item in Sitecore.

Lifetime and publishing fields

If you check standard values of any item, you surely get two section - Lifetime and Publishing.

Lifetime fields

These fields are applied on individual version and language.

• Valid from - Date and time from which this items version is available on delivery database and hence available for access to front end
• Valid to - After this Date and time, this item version is removed from delivery database.
• Hide version - Hide this item version from accessing. Its useful if you have created multilinguaal site and for specific language such as French, you don't want to publish it. So check this checkbox to hide French language version.

Publishing fields

All fields of publishing section are shared. These fields are applied on all versions and languages of an item.

• Publish - Copy this item at specified datetime to web(delivery) database.
• Unpublish - Delete this item at specified datetime from web(delivery) database
• Publishing targets - Copy / Delete this item from selected targets instances delivery databases
• Never publish - Don't publish this item. In this case item will not copied to your Web database. If item is already published, then this item will be deleted from WEB database.

If you had not published the item yet and now if you specify the datetime in Publish field and marked Publishing targets, then item will be automatically publish around specified date time on specified target delivery instances. Please note this will not published at exact specified date time but somewhere after to specified date time when publish agent will run.

Auto publish will only work if you have specified interval for publish agent in Web.config file as

<!-- Agent to publish database periodically -->

<agent type="Sitecore.Tasks.PublishAgent" method="Run" interval="00:00:00">

  <param desc="source database">master</param>

  <param desc="target database">web</param>

  <param desc="mode (full or smart or incremental)">incremental</param>

  <param desc="languages">en, da</param>

</agent>

Here 00:00:00 means auto publish is disabled. So a value "00:10:00" means run scheduler once in every 10 minutes as

<agent type="Sitecore.Tasks.PublishAgent" method="Run" interval="00:10:00">

I hope you like this Sitecore lesson. Stay tuned for more Sitecore related articles.

Till that happy sitecoring :)

Please leave your comments or share this article if it’s useful for you.