Sitecore MVP 2022 Announcement

 

Mohammed Syam wins Sitecore Most Valuable Professional award

Elite distinction awarded for commitment and dedication to the Sitecore community

Sitecore Commerce :: Extending Checkout Shipping Step Fields

 Recently I worked on a sitecore commerce implementation, and while working on too many extension areas in sitecore commerce one of these areas was working with checkout process, we needed to extend the checkout shipping address steps, in this blog post will highlight the main areas that you would need to be aware of and need to be updated, in addition to best practices while working with Commerce SXA theme items. are you read? keep reading!! 

Sitecore Symposium 2021 Recap

What a wonderful Sitecore Symposium we had this year, yes for one more year we had it online, but as always it was a lot of fun and a lot of new announcements and news, Sitecore CDP, Search, Discover, Send, OrderCloud and many more have been announced, all can be combined in a new CMS! yes a new composable CMS, you can have a fully SaaS content management solution with Sitecore new composable DXP, if you got excited, keep reading! :) 

Sitecore xConnect Circuit Breaker

Have you heard of Circuit Breaker design pattern? have you heard of configuring Circuit break for Sitecore xConnect? no, then this article is for you, I've been reviewing sitecore log files on my local Commerce environment and accidently found error messages related to Circuit Breaker while seeing xConnect errors caused by my xConnect instance had wrong connection strings info, I got interested and wanted to understand what is it and when it was introduced?! keep reading! :) 

Sitecore Commerce - Braintree Online Payment not working

We have been involved in many Sitecore Commerce projects recently, and its time to start blogging about anything I see useful while working though Sitecore commerce, here is one of the issues I faced and the fix was too simple, its related to Sitecore commerce and Braintree payment plugin. excited, keep reading! 

Sitecore Analytics Downloads : Custom Export

 If you worked with Sitecore Analytics before, you must have come across Top downloads report under behavior tab, this report  shows the assets that your contacts have downloaded the most from your website. but sometimes you may get a request from your client to get more information and control over this report, like as example, sort, filter, or maybe show all assets not only the top ones. In this case you would need to go with a custom approach, either built a custom analytics report or why not to export the report into a CSV and give your client a full control over it. In this post, I'll walk you through a step by step approach to pull these information from Analytics database into a csv format. excited?! keep reading! 

Working with Web Client SDK :: Performance Tips!

 Have you worked with Sitecore Content Hub Web Client SDK [External Integration]? or are you planning to using it with you next project? you will definitely find this post useful, this post will focus on some points that will definitely affect/enhance you application performance, we will discuss APIs calls, properties/meta data loads and workarounds, so keep reading! 

Coveo Custom Popular Searches Rendering

 In a recent Coveo implantation I worked on, our client asked for a home page rendering that should the most popular searches, so we need to get the common keywords that have been used in our global search page, and when user click on these words, the client will be redirected to the global search results page with the result pre-filtered using the clicked keyword, in this post I'll show you how I did that and please comment or email me if you have a better way of doing it. 

Sitecore Content Hub :: Web Client SDK and Aggregates

 In a recent integration project we worked on, we used Sitecore Content Hub (CH) Wen client SDK to build a web PI application to serve as middle point between Sitecore CH and a third party application, we learned a lot through this project, and one of these learning lessons is the speed of pulling data from CH and how CH aggregates would be great help while working on such implementation, in this post I'll introduce aggregates and discuss how it could help enhance your application performance, excited? keep reading :) 

Enhanced Package Designer

 This year sitecore hackathon was so excited, we participated in " The best enhancement to the Sitecore Admin (XP) for Content Editors & Marketers" category, and we build a simple but very useful feature, how may times you worked on creating a Sitecore Package and you missed to include the media items? how many times you wanted to package specific item version? our Enhanced Package Designer module will offer you these functionalities, all what you need to do is to install a simple package. 

Sitecore Virtual Users on a CD scaled environment

How many times you worked with virtual users in Sitecore? Do you know what is Sitecore virtual users? have you ever run into issues with virtual users on your production environment? In this post I would like to share my experience with virtual users in a scaled production users, if you don't know virtual users or when/how to use it, or if you run into issues with it I highly suggest you keep reading!

 

Sitecore Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 2021

 

MVP award is being given by Sitecore, the global leader in digital experience and content management every year to recognize the individuals who contributed over the previous year, I'm honoured, thrilled and humbled to be awarded as a Sitecore MVP for the 6th year in a row, it still feels the same way as the first time I got it.  

Sitecore Content Hub :: Passing Data to Script from External System

If you worked with Sitecore Content Hub you may cross the need of scheduling a trigger for some scripts you have running in Content Hub, and you probably found that Sitecore Content Hub doesn't offer a schedule tasks for running scripts, so you need to integrate with external system, and Azure function is one of the external systems/services that you could use, in this post, I will show how you can trigger a script in Content Hub from azure function as well as how you can pass parameters into the script. keep reading! 

Sitecore Content Hub : External Component

You probably familiar with Sitecore Content Hub pages and pages components, you could tried adding the out of the box components to a page but do you know that you can create you own component? In this post I will explain Sitecore Content Hub External Components and walk you through creating a simple CH external component. 

Sitecore Content Hub :: Refresh Renditions

 In this post I will explain how you can refresh renditions, both the OOTB existing Content Hub feature and how to programmatically do this, to get a good idea on refresh renditions, I would suggest you first read this blog post before going through this one. we will talk about mass edit jobs, processing job and limitation of the existing OOTB and how you can overcome this.

Sitecore Symposium 2020 Recap, What's coming Content Hub?

 In this year special Sitecore Symposium there were a lot for new stuff and news around Sitecore Content Hub, a lot has been shared through the road map keynote by Desta Price, EVP Product Management at Sitecore and Tom De Ridder, Chief Technology Officer at Sitecore, starting from Content insights, Content Coverage until the new Content as a Service (CaaS) offering that is coming in the early 2021, also some new news about the CMP connector that has been recently release and the new versions on the roadmap, want to know more about these, keep reading! 

Sitecore Symposium 2020 Recap - Day 1

 The first ever Digital Sitecore Symposium kicked off on Monday October, 26th 2020, with a Virtual Happy Hour by Sitecore CMO Paige O’Neil and Sitecore Official Comedian, Jake Johannsen. As an amazing annual Sitecore Conference, 4,500 attendees with more than half of them from outside of the United States, attending from a 70+ counties, showed up this year. Symposium is the ideal place for learning new platform features and products while networking with other Sitecore enthusiasts.

   

Sitecore Content Hub for Developers, Where to write code logic?

 In the previous post I gave an introduction for the different sections you as developer will deal with when using Sitecore Content Hub, In this post I will show you a simple scenario when you need to write a custom code for updating an asset an example, and where you can add this code, mainly there are two places where you can have this logic, you can create a new Content Hub script or create an azure function on your function app azure resource. 

Sitecore Content Hub: Renditions

 In this post we will talk about Sitecore Content Hub renditions, media processing settings and flows and also share a code logic you may need to use when working with DAM and assets renditions, specially if you know there is no auto refresh of renditions in Content Hub, so if you added or made any changes to your media processing settings, this will take affect on the new uploaded/processed assets but not existing un-updated assets.

Sitecore Content Hub For Developers Introduction

 In this series of Sitecore Content Hub for developers, I'll share with you all the information you need to start working and getting familiar with Sitecore Content Hub and specially I'll focus on the areas related to developers, you probably familiar with the different modules that Sitecore Content Hub Offers, Digital Asset Management (DAM),  Content Marketing Platform (CMP), Product Content Management (PCM) and Marketing Resource Management (MRM), if you're not still familiar with these, thats fine, check this article to get an idea. 

In this post and coming posts of Sitecore Content Hub for Developers we will discuss Schema, Entities, Scripts, Actions, Triggers, REST API, Azure Functions, Package export/import, in addition of how you can have IntelliSense while using Stylelabs SDK.

Sitecore XA ::Custom Search Results Using Scriban

In a recent project I was working, we used Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) out of the box search renderings, but we needed to have control over the html of the search results, we started looking of how to implement this and we ended up using the new SXA 9.3 variant option Scriban to create a variation of the search results, in this post will show you how you can accomplish this in no time. 

In the days of COVID-19, SUGJO Going Virtual!

We had a wonderful virtual meetup today, April 12th 2020, with the increasing lock down caused by COVID-19, we planned our Sitecore User Group Jordan meetup to be virtual, we had a great one, two full sessions with more than 20 attendees, keep reading for the details.

Sitecore Scriban Extension - How To Control a Link Field!

In this post I will show you a couple of custom Scriban extensions that I needed to create on a recent project I was working on, first example is how you can get an item URL counting for server URL / Site resolving and another example of how you can pull a link of a link field. Before that if you're new to Scriban, take a quick look for this post, I'm sure you will find it useful. 

Sitecore SXA Scriban

I have been working on a new Sitecore 9.3 implementation with Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) 9.3 recently and I got chance to work with some interesting new stuff that I would like to share with you in a couple of blog posts, I expect you will find these very useful and fun, SXA 9.3 came with a lot of new features and enactments, one of these new features is using Scriban Templateting in rendering variants, so, in this post will give an introduction of what is a rendering variant? and what is Scriban? and on the next posts will show you how we can build a custom extensions for Scriban.

Coveo Custom search hub implementation

In a recent project I was working on, this project contain up to 7 microsites, were these microsites are sub trees of the content tree under the main site home item, there was a Coveo for Sitecore cloud 4 implementation, and as requested we wanted to use the same global search results, BUT when a user initiated search from any of these microsites we wanted the search hub to be specific to that search interface, in this post I will walk you through the custom implementation we did.

Sitecore SaaS

Sitecore symposium 2019 took place last week in Orlando, Florida for the second year, and as with all previous Sitecore Symposiums, it came with some big announcements. The biggest one was the new Sitecore SaaS offering that will be available in its first version by Summer 2020. Sitecore SaaS will give the ability to focus on the innovation part of building solutions using Sitecore, like custom solution design, component development, content strategy, and creative content and presentation, and take care of the heavy lifting like installing, managing and upgrading the software. Also, this means a new developer experience for working with the platform.

Override Coveo Global Search Box

In a recent project I was working on, this projtect contain up to 7 microsites, were these microsites sub trees of the content tree under the main site home item, there was a Coveo for Sitecore cloud 4 implementation, and as requested we wanted to use the same global search result, BUT when a user initiated search from any of these microsites we wanted the search result to be pre-filtered by the microsite the search initiated from, in this post I will show you how we did this.

My Experience with Sitecore processing/aggregation

In a recent project I worked on I had to work with a site with more than 2 million visit per month causing issues with the processing of xDB data into the reporting database, the aggregation was too slow comparing to the data collection, in this post I will share the things we tried and how we overcome this issue at the end.

Whats new in Sitecore 9.2? SSL offloading

In this post we will talk about a new feature that sitecore offers with the newly released 9.2 version, which is SSL Offloading, so, What is SSL Offloading? and What advantages I can get from it? and How I can do it with Sitecore 9.2?

Whats new in Sitecore 9.2? Sitecore Graphical Setup - Sitecore Installation Assistant

In this post we will talk about the new Sitecore 9.2 Sitecore Installation Assistant that sitecore provides with latest sitecore release, now and again Sitecoreians will have user interface to install Sitecore as a second approach of using SIF scripts.

Whats new in Sitecore 9.2? Active Personalized Experiences

Sitecore 9.2 has been released on July, 22, 2019 with a lot of new features and enhancements, In this series of posts we will go through these new cool features and talk a little about each one, in this post we will talk about a new feature by which Sitecore will offer a centralized location where we can view all personalization rules across the sitecore instance.

SUGCON 2019 Takeaways - Day 2

Using xDB at Scale by Mike Edwards

Mike gave a useful solution for applying profile cards or AB testing across a large number of pages, a lot of times we need to apply a profile cards to many pages or sections, this will need a lot of work from content editors, of course if we exclude the standard values item, the reason we exclude that is for the risk of overriding this item with deployments.

SUGCON 2019 Takeaways - Day 1

Welcome and Keynotes by Sitecore CTO Mark Frost

Sitecore CTO Mark Frost started SUGCON 2019 by focusing on the importance of community, developers in particular, Sitecore is investing in the community, community of highly skilled people, people will help customers to achieve their goals.

Sitecore CTO announced that this year Sitecore user group conference – Europe 2019 has more than 40 sessions, more than 650 people in addition to more than 40 Sitecore employees.

Sitecore publish programmatically not working

This is a quick post in which I will explain an interesting setting with sitecore publishing programmatically, I believe every once and while we need to publish sitecore item from code, the code for doing this is very simple but in my case and for some reason it doesn’t work?! 

Sitecore® MVP 2019 Award

January, 31^st 2019 Sitecore® announced the winners of 2019 most valuable professionals, I am horned to being awarded for the fourth time in a row. This year Sitecore® recognized 186 Technology MVPs, 37 Strategy MVPs, 18 Commerce MVPs, and 74 Ambassador MVPs. To read the official press release click here

Sitecore 9 Data Flow - Part 3 - Process and Aggregate

In this post I will walk you through the processing and aggregation of the collected analytics data in sitecore, if you didn't check the previous two posts I really recommend you go through these before checking this one, here are the links for the previous posts:

• Sitecore 9 data flow part-1 introduction
• Sitecore 9 Data flow – Part 2 – Collect and Store

Image Courtesy to jammykam

Sitecore 9 Data flow – Part 2 – Collect and Store

In this post you will find a useful information about sitecore process of gathering information and storing it, all the details you need, the tracker, contact, interactions and the different servers roles involved in this process.

Before you start reading this post I recommend you to check the following first:

• Sitecore 9 Data flow – Part 1– Introduction

Image Courtesy to jammykam

Sitecore 9 Data flow – Part 1– Introduction

In this series of blog posts I will describe the flow of data in sitecore 9 from the moment when Sitecore gather information to the moment we see these data in reports, everyone knows that Sitecore with its analytics and marketing power (With Sitecore Experience Platform (XP)) gather information for each visit, move this information through a flow until we can see the information in a well-organized reports.

Image Courtesy to jammykam

Sitecore Experience Editor and General Link Field encoding

This is a quick post I wanted to publish in which I will explain a weird issue happened with one of our clients, actually it took time to figure it out, imagine that sometimes and without any known scenario you “lose” data from master database on a production environment! “Lose data”? yes, a general link fields suddenly become empty, and after publishing you will have issues on live! You want to know how, when, why, please completed reading.

WFFM Data Report Statistics

In a recent project I worked on, client reported an issue with the statistics fields for WFFM reports,  the visits, submission attempts and dropouts are displaying as zeros while the number of successful submissions has a value. This was the trigger to look deeper for this issue, in this post will mention the different WFFM forms data providers, and what is the issue with these statistics fields.

Setting rendering data source in a predefined condition

Recently I was working with client were personalization is major component of their multi-site Sitecore based website, and we were in the need for using sitecore predefined conditions, but we hit a wall where we discovered that you can only add conditions to predefined conditions BUT with no actions although the rule editor allow you to add conditions, Do you want to know how we overcome this issue, keep reading :) 

SUCON Europe 2018 – Day 2

 Day 2 of this amazing event started early, it started with a welcome talk by Tamas then an interesting session by Todd Mitchell & Lars Birkholm Petersen about the power of connected data, once more these guys did a great job. I will give you a brief about the great sessions that I had the chance to attend on this day.

SUGCON Europe 2018 - Day 1

You have to like Sitecore, as a platform and as a community people, today this post is coming from Berlin where Sitecore user group conference 2018 is being conducted. In this post I will share my experience for the first day of SUGCON in addition to the previous day.

Are You a Sitecore Developer Located in Jordan? Are You a Developer interested in Sitecore? Are you an Organization Interested in Sitecore?

If you are a sitecore developer and located in Jordan, if you're a developer interested in Sitecore or if you are a marketer interested in Sitecore and located in Jordan then this post is definitely for you guys. Also, For organizations interested in sitecore and located in Jordan you will be interested in this post too.  

WFFM - Custom Email Confirmation Field

In this post I will walk you through the steps you need to do to create a custom WFFM field for an email confirmation, this was a recent request by one of our clients, if you ever had a similar request or you expect to have one; this post will make you life easier.

Sitecore Experience Profile - Identify and Merge Contact when submitting WFFM form Troubleshooting - Part 3

In this section will share a personal experience on the same subject I talked about in the first two parts, in which when we applied the code that explained before the anonymous records still appear under experience profile report, so what we did wrong?!

Sitecore Experience Profile - Identify and Merge Contact when submitting WFFM form - Part 2

In this post I will show you how you can use a WFFM custom action to identify and merge a contact and of course I will provide you with a fully documented code that you can find it in GitHub, in case you missed the previous post I recommend you to go back and check it, it will give you an overview about the problem that we are trying to overcome here.

Sitecore Experience Profile And The “Anonymous” Records Problem - Part 1

In a recent project I worked on a question came from client is why we see “Anonymous” records when we open experience profile from the launch pad? So, I started to dig into this and I found a lot of useful information, none of them was a complete solution to my problem, so after completing this I thought I should share a full package that contains the problem and the solution.

Sitecore User Group Jordan Experience

In this post I will share with you my experience as a speaker with Sitecore User Group Jordan  for the first time and will add some useful information about our goals, ideas and future plans.