I'm going through a project right now where I need to duplicate some vanilla environments. Due to resource locations being spread out I decided a manual clone was the easiest and fastest path, so today I'll share the process of cloning a Sitecore installation with SQL in Azure, and SOLR in a dedicated VM.

This morning I was alerted to both shard databases burning at 100%, which should never happen in a right-sized configuration. After some checking around, the problem appeared to be bots indexing this site. That's great, we like bots! But Sitecore wasn't identifying these visits for what they were, and began processing them as Users, to be collected into the xDB. Here's a quick guide to keep these bots that slipped past detection at bay.

Ok so you have your page templates created, and standard values are set up so desired components are default. Pretty standard stuff. So, what happens when you're using dynamic placeholders, sometimes many at once, and you want to have components in each in the template? It's a simple trick, so here we go.

I've been a fan of the graphical installer coming back and simplifying installations. I was even more impressed with the requirements check and auto-installation, which would set up a plethora of components and services. It seems though there's some items missing from this list which needed to be done manually, and we'll go through that today.

Ok if that title isn't clear enough, let me try again. Our new site has a dedicated domain for each language, so we need to configure the language switcher to point to a FQDN instead of a relative path. There are a few ways to do this, like using configs, but I'm going to show you show to manage this using the site's root node. We're going to also redirect to the right language when context isn't available using IIS.

Habitat is a great demo instance that has been used to showcase what Sitecore can do. I'm grateful for this tool since we can spin up a copy quickly to use during project initialization phases where people new to Sitecore can quickly get familiar with it. Installation can be tricky, so I'll cover the steps and some hiccups I've come across.

The Sitecore Installation Framework has been a tremendous advancement in Sitecore instance management, but completely dropping the installer wasn't necessarily needed. The feedback was heard and with the release of Sitecore 9.2, an installer has been reintroduced. It brings up most of the way there, but there's still some room for improvement. We'll cover the installation of 9.2 with this assistant and what else is needed that it doesn't provide.

Each of my scaled environments will have at least two publishing targets. Yes, you can use Sitecore's preview tools, but this has its limitations. After decades of working with marketing teams I can say it's always a good idea to have a private URL, only available to the company, where they can review pending changes for an upcoming campaign etc., without having to log in.

One of the most used installations from Sitecore is the Single Developer instance, where Sitecore, Identity Server and xConnect will serve to localhost. This is convenient, but in a team environment we want other developers to access our VM if we need to collaborate, troubleshoot, etc. So how do we get here? There are some post-installation steps needed, and I'll list them in this step-by-step guide.

One of the prerequisites for a Sitecore installation is Solr. I'm excessively lazy, so having a script to do the complete installation for me is something I'm going to keep around. Today we'll install Solr in 2 simple steps!