This can happen in any ASP.NET Web Application, but as Sitecore 8's default web.config file is now 246 kb this makes it extremely susceptible to exceeding the default 250 kb limit.

To change the size limit you need to modify/create the following registry keys:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\InetStp\Configuration\MaxWebConfigFileSizeInKB  (REG_DWORD)

On 64-bit machines you may also have to update the following as well

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\InetStp\Configuration\MaxWebConfigFileSizeInKB (REG_DWORD)

You will probably find that these keys need to be created, rather than just being updated. After changing them you will also need to reset IIS.

Alternatively

Alternatively you can leave the default values at 250 kb and split the web.config files into separate files.

More information on doing this can be found here:

http://www.davidturvey.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/how-to-split-the-web-config-into-mutliple-files/

My personal preference for Sitecore projects is to update the the max file size as this allows keeping the web.config file as close to the default install as possible. The benefit of doing this is it makes upgrades easier, rather than needing to know why your web.config doesn't match the installation instructions.

A few weeks ago I blogged about extending profile matching over multiple visits in Sitecore. The basis of the post was to look at options on how you could extend Sitecore so that personalisation could use historical persona data rather than just data from the current session.

In this post I'm going to be looking at the SBOS Accelerators module which lists as one of its features "Historical Conditional Renderings".

So what does it do?

Rather than change the way data gets recorded about a user, the SBOS Accelerator adds an additional 5 personalization rules to the rule set editor. These are:

• where the specific campaign has been triggered within x days
• where the specific goal has been triggered within x days
• where behaviour based on last x days matches the specific pattern card in the specific profile
• where the specific page has been visited within x days
• where the value of specific profile key compares to specific value, based on behaviour from last x days

As well as allowing a rule to look at profile data over a number of days, the days option can also be changed to look at profile data over a number of visits.

This option of allowing us to specify a number of days or a number of visits helps to overcome the issue of data needing to degrade at different rates over time. We can set rules to promote something that a user may still be interested in by limiting the data to the last week, or we can target personality traits that shouldn't change by taking a few months into consideration.

What's important to note though is profile data is still being recorded on a per visit basis, so we still don't have an overall accumulation of points over time and an assigned pattern card is still being based on an individual visit. But we're able to create rules based on pattern cards assigned in multiple visits.

Some things to note

The SBOS Accelerators are currently only available for Sitecore versions 6.6 - 7.2. It currently hasn't been updated to work with the new Mongo based analytics db in 7.5+.

The module has been written by Sitecore Support and is marked as being tested by Sitecore, so you can expect a decent level of reliability. However it is not covered by your Support agreement with Sitecore so you may not get any help with issues you encounter. The source for the module is available for you to edit though.

Links

SBOS Accelerators on the Sitecore Marketplace

It's a frequent scenario that a website your in the process of building needs to be accessible over the internet before it should actually be publicly available over the internet. This can come in the form of clients needing to review staging sites before there live, test sites needing to be accessible to testers who may not be in a location that can access private servers, or working jointly with other suppliers.

This scenario presents a lot of dangers such as, the URL of a site could get leaked early ruining a marketing strategy, or the site could end up in Google destroying the SEO value on the clients current site and even worse, actually get real customers visiting it.

There are only 2 real methods of protecting test/staging sites. One is adding authentication to the site restricting access to people with a valid username and password. The other is IP white-listing so only people from a valid IP can access the site.

In the past I've seen people suggest using a robots.txt to tell search engines to ignore the site. This is guaranteed to fail, Google will index a site with a robots file saying not to. Your robot's file may say don't crawl, but that auto generated Sitemap will be obeyed an the files indexed. There will also come a time the robots file gets copied live de-indexing the live site, or someone forgets the file on staging and the staging site is indexed.

Using IIS to set up IP restrictions

Using IIS to set up IP restrictions is quick and easy, and what's best about it is you can set it at the server level and not worry about people forgetting to add it to new sites. Better still you can also easily add configuration at a website level to allow certain people to see certain sites rather than the whole box.

Installing the Feature

First you need to make sure you have the feature installed on IIS. To do this on Windows Server 2012:

1. Go to Server Manager and click "Add roles and features"
2. Click next to take you from the Before you begin page to Installation Type
3. Leave Role-based selected and click next
4. On the Server Selection screen the server your on should be auto selected. Click next
5. On the Server Roles screen scroll down to "Web Server (IIS)". IP and Domain Restrictions is located under Web Server (IIS) > Web Server > Security
6. Click the check box on IP and Domain Restrictions if its not already selected and complete the wizard to install the features.

Configuring IIS

The set up an IP restriction in IIS do the following:

Open IIS and select your server in the left hand treeview. Alternatively if you wanted to add the restrictions to an individual site, select that site.

Within the IIS section you should have an item titled IP Address and Domain Restrictions

The configured IP address will be listed out. To add a new one click the "Add Allow Entry" action on the right.

This screen allows you to set up allow and deny lists, but the restrictions don't actually have an effect until you edit the feature settings.

On this screen you need to set the access for unspecified clients to deny. You can also specify a deny action type which alters the status code between unauthorized, forbidden, not found and abort.

What this doesn't do

What this won't do is block all traffic not in the allow list to your server. It will only cover IIS, so if you have other services running on your box like SQL Server, Mongo, Apache etc this will all still be publicly available.

f your using Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) and Github or Git as your source control you may experience an issue where TDS is unable to create/update some of the items in Sitecore, due to a content length issue.

The error will look something like this:

Failed to load version 1 for language en
Length of field content does not match the content-length attribute. File name: name, field id: {id}

What's happening comes down to how Github encodes line ending. If your item contains a Rich Text field you can end up with data that has been serialized with both CRLF and LF as the line feed. This will have been included in the content length. However when you push to Git, the CRLF value will have been removed making the content length value incorrect.

To overcome this issue you need to update your .gitattributes file to treat these files differently. Just add this to your file:

# TDS files should be treated as binary
*.item -text

How do I create a .gitattributes file?

If you don't have a .gitattributes file you may run into an issue with windows where it won't let you create it, due to requiring a file-name rather than just an extension.

To create the file:

1. Create the text file gitattributes.txt
2. Open it in a text editor and add your rules, then save and close
3. Hold SHIFT, right click the folder you're in, then select Open command window here
4. Then rename the file in the command line, with ren gitiattributes.txt .gitattributes