Sitecore 9.3 Archives - Madhu Anbalagan's Blog

My 2020 Reflections

2020 has been a rough ride, Covid-19 has changed our lives. Hope we all get vaccinated in the upcoming year. Stay home, stay safe.

Here are my contributions for the year –

Presentations:

Feb 11 – Sitecore 9.3 new features and live installation – SUG Pittsburgh
March 26 – Smart Experience Forms – SUG Pittsburgh
April 12 – Sitecore 9.3 new features and live installation – SUG Jordon
July 15 – What’s new in Sitecore 9.3 and Live Installation – SUG QueenCity

Conferences I attended:

Sitecore Symposium
All SUG Boston/ Pittsburgh/Queen City meetups.

Co-organized SUG-Pittsburgh Meetups :

Feb 11 – What’s new with Sitecore 9.3 and Live Install
Mar 26 – Virtual Smart Experience Forms with Sitecore
Apr 22 – Marketing Automation – Building Blocks (Virtual)
May 27 – Automate all the Things (Virtual)
Jun 23 – Optimizing Performance in Sitecore (Virtual)
Jul 22 – Dive into Sitecore Docker with Jammykam (Virtual)
Aug 18 – Sitecore Content Hub 101 (Virtual)
Sep 23 – Sitecore Content Hub Integration by Akshay (Virtual)
Oct 14 – How can you go with Sitecore JSS? (Virtual)
Nov 11 – Kick-off Kubernetes(K8) (Virtual)

Co-organized SUG-QueenCity Meetups :

Participation:

Sitecore Lunch
Hackathon

Plans for 2021 :

Learn and contribute:

Content Hub
Cortex
Sitecore AI Personalization
Sitecore Experience Forms
Docker Containers
Sitecore 10

Co-organize :

Monthly SUG-Pittsburgh meetup
Monthly SUG-QueenCity meetup

Presentations:

SUG Meetups
Sitecore SUGCON EU/Symposium

Happy Sitecoring!

December 11, 2020

0

Horizon / Sitecore

Sitecore Horizon 9.3 Install, Troubleshooting, and Uninstall

I want to share my experience on the Installation of Sitecore Horizon 9.3, Uninstallation, and the errors I faced during installation.

Prerequisites

Install Sitecore 9.3
Ensure CMS site is accessible with https protocol
Ensure WebSocket Protocol enabled

Ensure Sitecore Identity is installed. For example, if your Sitecore CMS instance has the address https://cmdomain.com, then install Sitecore identity with the address identity.cmdomain.com
Sitecore Installation Framework SIF 2.2.0
ASP.NET Core/.NET Core: Runtime & Hosting Bundle 2.1
Node 10 and npm 6

After installing the tools, restart your machine.

Installation

Download Horizon 9.3 from here. I downloaded the on-premises deployment.

Extract the zip file and open Parameters.ps1
Fill out the below parameters –

Run install.ps1 in Powershell Administrator mode

Once the installation is done (only takes 2 to 3 minutes), you will see a new Icon in Sitecore

Clicking the Icon opens Horizon (yes, it’s separate IIS site) and you can explore the new features!

Troubleshooting Error

I faced this error after the installation was successful. When I opened Horizon, here is the error message I got.

Failed to render a page: Failed to render the root extension, with error: Failed to render a fragment. Status code: InternalServerError, message:

I checked the logs (C:\inetpub\wwwroot\[Hoirzon Website\logs) and it showed below message

[1] Ensure that Node.js is installed and can be found in one of the PATH directories. Make sure the Node executable is in one of those directories, or update your PATH.

I verified that the Node.js path (C:\Users\manbalagan\AppData\Roaming\nvm\v10.16.0\) was accessible and PATH was correct.

Also, I uninstalled Node v10.16.0 and reinstalled. Restarted my machine. Nothing helped.

Finally, I resolved the issue by adding ‘Everyone‘ permission and allowed full control to NVM folder (C:\Users\manbalagan\AppData\Roaming\nvm) fixed the issue! IIS couldn’t access the folder without ‘Everyone’ permission.

Uninstall

If you want to uninstall the failed versions (to clean up IIS sites it created), here is how you can do it –

Uninstalling is straight forward – just need to run the uninstall.ps1 script

After uninstalling, it didn’t remove the Horizon Icon in Desktop mode. Clicking on the icon goes to 404 page. It would be clean if the icon is also removed.

Hope this helps someone. Any issues, let me know in comments section.

Happy Sitecoring!

July 9, 2020

0

Forms / Sitecore

What’s new in Sitecore Forms 9.3

You can now publish the forms within Forms Designer. No need to navigate to Content Editor to publish. This is pretty handy when developing forms.

Users can now delete submitted data for a particular form and specify a date range.

You can now use the Sitecore bot detection functionality to verify whether visitor is human. This removed the need for a Captcha element. Nice work Sitecore!

Now the forms element that allows you to add email confirmation to a form.

Users can now use the Redirect submit action to redirect to a URL and pass parameters to it.

To add file upload functionality to your forms, you can now use the File upload forms element. I use to utilize the Forms Extensions module(It’s very nice), it’s now included in forms element.

Apart from these, there are bunch of enhancements made –

Improved database performance by increasing our ability to prevent deadlocks.

You can now use the client-side API to retrieve form fields, for example when you build a custom submit action that needs to show all the form fields.

You no longer need to rebuild the master index after you install Sitecore XP.

Hope this helps. Any questions, leave a comment below.

Happy Sitecoring!

March 14, 2020

0

Sitecore

Install Sitecore 9.3 (using SIA) quickly in 20 minutes!

I’m participating in Sitecore Hackathon 2020 for the second time. One of the requirement is to have sitecore 9.3 installed on your machine except for commerce . I want to share my experience how i quickly installed Sitecore 9.3 using SIA(Sitecore Install Assistant) in 20 minutes!

Note: No need install any prerequisites(includes Solr) manually, SIA will take care of it.