Health Monitoring of Azure Web Apps with Sitecore

Recently when diagnosing an issue with a Sitecore website hosted on Azure Web Apps, I noticed an intermittent issue where we were seeing the application going up and down frequently. i.e. up for a minute, down for two, up, down, up, down. Investigation led me to see that it was one instance of the Web … Continue reading Health Monitoring of Azure Web Apps with Sitecore →

Upgrading Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers to 8.1 and keeping MSSQL

If you are lucky enough to need to upgrade a Sitecore solution containing WFFM from 7.2 or earlier (or even 6.x as I have been doing) to 8.1, and you have a requirement to keep form data stored in MSSQL then you may encounter a few issues. The first thing to note is that in … Continue reading Upgrading Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers to 8.1 and keeping MSSQL →

Sitecore- why are my dates all wrong?!

The short answer - Sitecore changed something and you didn't read all the small print in the release notes (see 'Time zones and UTC'). When upgrading Sitecore to 8.0 or higher you may have noticed that dates and times are displaying incorrectly. Or if you were unlucky enough to upgrade in the winter you may … Continue reading Sitecore- why are my dates all wrong?! →

Sitecore upgrades and indexes

If you are upgrading Sitecore, after you have performed all upgrade steps delete the indexes folder and rebuild all indexes. I have experienced issues recently with some unusual indexing problems. Indexes would become corrupt and unusable only to be fine after a rebuild and then break again hours or days later. Some trawling of the … Continue reading Sitecore upgrades and indexes →

Sitecore indexes – timing is everything

Three years ago I experienced a problem where delivery websites were not getting their indexes updated following content changes in the authoring environment. We went around the houses and openned a ticket with Sitecore support. After some back and forth they suggested we check that the web and database server clocks are synchronised as this … Continue reading Sitecore indexes – timing is everything →

Merging two Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers databases

Recently I was involved with the upgrade of a Sitecore solution which also included upgrading the Web Forms For Marketers (WFFM) module. The live Sitecore upgrade required me to run the live site in tandem with upgrading a copy of the site which at the end I would switch over. Putting a content freeze in … Continue reading Merging two Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers databases →