Author: Nicola
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Growing Episerver DXC instance? You might want a tool like this…
I’ve recently just started working with a new client who has an existing Episerver DXC implementation with about 16 sites (12 live, 4 underway). I was quite overwhelmed with the number of content types in their solution: 65 page types and about 130 block types. Below is an architecture diagram of just page types. When…
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Episerver – HtmlHelper does not contain a definition for ShellInitializationScript
If you have tried extending the navigation of Episerver and implemented a custom module with its own view and got the following errors: ‘System Web WebPages Html HtmlHelper’ does not contain a definition for ‘ShellInitializationScript’ and the best extension method overload ‘EPiServer Shell Web Mvc Html ScriptExtensions ShellInitializationScript( System Web Mvc HtmlHelper)’ has some invalid…
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Episerver Upgrade – Search Breaking changes
I’ve had to recently upgrade an episerver website from 8.9 to 11 and stumbled on a few breaking changes which were pretty straight-forward to fix. However, the entire SearchService.cs class had a lot of errors after the upgrade and it no longer knows about the classes that belong to EPiServer.Search.Queries. Turns out everything related to…
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Episerver Alloy – Could not open new database – File activation failure
Someone asked me today how to fix this error that he encountered after creating a new Episerver MVC project with the Alloy Template. I remember seeing this before myself and so I’m putting up a post for those out there who encounter the same problem. Server Error in ‘/’ Application. Could not open new database ‘EPiServerDB’.…
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Episerver Visitor Intelligence (prev. known as Insight / Profile Store) – Basic Implementation
A couple of weeks ago, I got the chance play with Episerver Insight on a local epi installation. It was very quick to setup, and tracking can be easily customised. Before I go into detail on how to set it up, here’s a quick overview of what it is and what it’s not. What is…
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Optimise your images using Cloudflare Polish
Today I got the chance to try out a Cloudflare product, called “Polish“, and I must say it’s not bad at all. What does Polish do? Dynamic image compression for both Lossless and Lossy mechanisms – Like a lot of tools out there, Polish offers dynamic compression of images using either Lossless or Lossy mechanisms; Lossless…
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Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is one geeky goodie
I must admit when I first used it, VSTS can be overwhelming and scary, especially to non-technical people. Here in Australia, Atlassian products are very popular. And I can understand why. The combo of Jira, Bitbucket & Confluence is very good. However, with what VSTS has become now, being an all-inclusive platform that caters for…
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SEO – When your webpage suddenly disappears on Google SERP
Today, I noticed one of the pages in my client’s site disappeared from the Google SERP. It was on the 2nd page of Google for a specific search keyword, but it can no longer be found anywhere in the SERP at all. When I do the trick of searching for “site:{DOMAIN_URL_HERE}”, all other pages in…
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Azure Virtual Machines – Benefits of developing in the Cloud
It’s now over a year since I started developing on Azure Virtual Machines and while it’s not cheap (more on this later), it’s hard for me to go back and develop locally on physical machines. In this post, I’ll go over the advantages of owning and developing on a Virtual Machine hosted in the cloud.…
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How to generate an Umbraco XML Sitemap dynamically
Today, I implemented an XML sitemap in my Umbraco 7.7.9 installation. Here are the things I had to do: Create a Sitemap document type Create a Sitemap macro Create a rule for IIS URL rewriting of the sitemap.xml Author the Sitemap content page Sitemap document type My document type involves two properties which will allow…