Installing Sitecore 9 was never the easiest of things, particularly when you compare it to how relatively simple Sitecore 8 was. But if you install Sitecore 9.1 on the same machine and then try your trusty Sitecore 9.0 script you may find it's got even harder and there's a bunch of new issues to worry about.

Multiple version of SIF

The first issue your probably going to run into is an error saying a name parameter is missing. Your script hasn't change, but what has changed is the default version of SIF that's now running.

So the first change you need to make is to ensure your running the correct version of SIF. You can do this either by adding the command to your script or running this before calling you install script. It will take effect for the duration of your PowerShell session.

If you want to check what the active version of SIF is you can do this in a PowerShell window using

Certificates Error - Part 1

Now we're calling the right version of SIF, the next issue I encountered was to do with certs. Specifically I got this error:

This is due to the certificate for Sitecore 9.1 that has been installed. You can remove the certificate but then your Sitecore 9.1 install will break instead.

Alternatively add a "RootCertFilename" to the certificate definition:

Certificate Error - Part 2

This error looks exactly the same as the error above but you've already added that Root Cert File Name, so what's happening now.

The error is saying that it expected to find 1 certificate but found many instead. Each time you run the script the number of thumbprints also keeps going up.

TBH I'm not overly certain what causes this as most of the time you get the one root cert and your done forever more. But somehow you get a second and then get you in a loop of repeatedly deleting certificates only to discover they still exist somewhere. You know it's also not the certificate for the 9.1 install as the certificate has the new name you added to it.

For me the issue was although I had deleted them from my personal certificates, trusted root certificates, and even the c:\certificates folder they were being added to, what I needed to do was run this in PowerShell.

If your wanting to find out what certificates are installed on your machine you can run these

Make sure your config is actually correct

This one is really just my mistake. Multiple versions of Siteocore have meant rather than just having one "C:\reousrcefiles\" folder on my machine (as per instructions), I now have a few with the version post-fixed to the end. It only becomes apparent that the path in the install.ps1 file is wrong part way through the install process.

This year Sugcon came to London which given that's where I'm based is awesome for me. In total it was a 3 day conference starting with Sitecore Experience aimed more at marketers than developers. As a developer I only went to the 2 developer days, so for your benefit here's a summary of everything I saw.

Day 1

Day 1 started with a keynote, sadly life got in the way and I missed the first few hours. I'm told it was good though.

After that the day was split into a mix of sessions in the big room for all and smaller break out sessions where you could pick 1 of 4 to attend.

JSS Immersion - Lessons learned and looking ahead with Anastasiya Flynn

To kick things off I went to a talk on JSS, mostly because JSS is a subject I know very little about. This was something that became even more apparent as the talk went on! At the end of it I came away with an appreciation that I need to invest some time in learning a lot more, but my other take away was a few links on things that will help me out if I ever try some React stuff.

https://www.styled-components.com

https://www.react-spring.io

PAAS It on: Learning's from a year on Sitecore with Criss Titschinger

Criss works as a dev opps person and over the last year went on the journey of having a Sitecore 8.2 install upgraded to 9 using a fully cloud architecture in Azure.

Overall his experience sounded positive but he did have a few warnings from pain he experienced:

• Beware of cold start up times with web apps. These can be a real performance hit, especially when Azure decides its going to move your web app instance
• Web app slots share processing usage so when your warming one up, your live one is taking a hit. If you run on the edge of capacity, this will be an issue
• Azure search is easy to install but it has a field limitation of 1000 to watch out for
• Data migration in an upgrade takes a long time the second time. It took 9 days to migrate a years data from mongo! Only do it once.
• Run your upgrade on clean instances and do the code in visual studio.
• Web apps need to be on the premium service plan. The others are to weak
• Use elastic pools for your database to save money. The microservice architecture introduces a LOT of new dbs which are going to cost money in azure resources. Most of the time they also don't do that much so put them in a pool to share resources
• Moving to 9 is going to increase hosting charges. Be honest with clients about it.

Day 2

On Day 2 I got to attend from the start so it was a much fuller day for me.

10x your Sitecore development with Mark Cassidy

The day started with a talk on questioning how long it should take to build a Sitecore site. It was a question that never really got answered but the main thing Mark really raised was, do we over engineer what we do and would simpler actually be enough? He went on to show a time lapse video of himself implementing a bootstrap template in Sitecore which took 15 hours.

To build this site he didn't install any modules (no glass) and used just the standard Sitecore api. As he pointed out, it was all stuff that could be done by a dev with only the basic Sitecore training, which as there's a short supply of devs in the world, we can potentially make better use of who does what.

Extending and implementing cloud architectures with Rob Habraken

After one talk on cloud the day before I almost gave this one a miss, but I'm glad I didn't.

Rob gave us some of his learning's and things to look out for. As the the previous session the theme of Sitecore 9 becoming far more complex came up and he had some interesting takes on it:

• Use what you need, disable roles that you don't. I see plenty of Sitecore customers not making use of all the features, and when your in a microservice architecture it does raise the question of why even have this stuff turned on. If you don't use marketing automation then you don't need the role running. It's just costing money to do nothing.
• Scale down when your not using resource. Unlike a VM web apps can not be turned off so they always cost money. You can delete and recreate, but that's a pain. Instead set up a pipeline to scale them to the lowest resource setting when not being used.
• He went on to discuss and show how we can use azure functions and logic apps to implement our code rather than building into the main Sitecore project. However you should be careful overdoing it as it can become complex quickly and it's easy to end up with a massive unorganised list of individual azure functions.

Automated personalisation with Chris Nash and Niels Kuhnel

Chris and Niels pointed out the flaw in Sitecores reporting on personalised content. How do we know the rate each converts to a goal at? There's the A/B Test report's but that's not quite the same thing.

They went on to show how they had started measuring the display impressions and click through on personalised content. Then linking the results collected in the reporting db up to a Power BI dashboard.

Sitecore identity: A new Sitecore authentication mechanism with Himadri Chakrabarti

Himadri gave us a look at the new Identity Server framework in Sitecore 9.1:

• Identity server 4 framework
• Still uses old asp net membership provider underneath
• Can work with sub providers like Azure

Measure if you want to go faster with Jeremy Davis

Jeremy was in the situation where a site they were developing would have TV adverts during one of the most watch programs on British TV. Naturally he got scared and went looking for tools to help with performance. He told us about two of them:

• Sitecore debug tool in experience editor showing the time it takes for components to load.
• Using Visual Studio debugger to monitor processor usage and memory usage.

Both of these tools are very good at pointing you in the direction of smelly code and the best part is you already have them.

Unfortunately it's the kind of demo that really doesn't convert to text to write here.

We released JSS, you'll never guess what happened next with Adam Weber & Kam Figy

Adam and Kam showed us JSS working with SXA and Sitecore Forms. As mentioned before I don't know much about JSS but after this talk I'm convinced I definitely need to.

Right now it doesn't sound like I would make a site using it, but it could definitely be the future of how we build sites.

The stand out thing is being able to keep your Sitecore install unmodified which would essentially lead us to a real SAAS solution where a Sitecore instance could be spun up from the marketplace and then all other functionality added through server-less functions and a headless front end.

At this year’s Sitecore Symposium, Sitecore shared details of the great new features arriving in Sitecore 9.1 that will benefit everyone from developers to marketers, by offering enhancements in everything from machine learning to aid personalisation down to headless support for JavaScript developers.

Sitecore Cortex

Version 9 was the first introduction to Sitecore Cortex name, which is represents the machine learning capabilities found within Sitecore. In version 9 this was limited to Engagement Value, Optimisation and Path Analysis. Version 9.1 however is building on this base by introducing 3 new Cortex powered capabilities to the platform.

Personalisation Suggestions

Sitecore has been offering the ability to create personalised visitor experiences for a long time now, but half the challenge with this has always been knowing what you should personalise and how you should personalise it.

With Sitecore 9.1 you can now direct the results of content tests to be fed into the machine learning server. Sitecore will then analyse the results of the test and if certain segments responded better to one experience over another, if it did then it will suggest that is set up as a personalisation rule.

Content Tag Automation

Search engines and site searches work far better when content has been tagged correctly. However, tagging is a tedious task most content editors would rather do without. Sitecore 9.1 now helps content editors with this task by hooking into the Open Calais API for natural language processing of content-based fields on an item.

Headless Sitecore

At Symposium 2017, Sitecore announced Sitecore JavaScript Services as the first official step into supporting headless setups using Sitecore. Since then this has been available as a preview while the development continued. With Sitecore 9.1 this is now reaching general availability.

The Headless capabilities mean those working with popular frameworks such as Vue, React and Angular can now build rich applications using Sitecore as the backend without needing to write .net code.

Unlike other headless offerings, Sitecore Headless still retains the functionality that makes Sitecore great. Namely, tracking, optimisation, personalisation and there’s even previews in the Sitecore Experience Editor.

And more

These are just 2 of the stand out features coming in Sitecore 9.1, but as well as this there are;

• Updates to EXM to help avoid spamming recipients while also being able to classify vital emails such as order confirmations to always be sent
• Enhancements to Sitecore Forms and Marketing Automation that were introduced in Sitecore 9
• Sitecore Experience Accelerator now supports WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines
• Preview of Project Horizon, the next version of web content editing
• Simplification of the installation process with SIF 2.0

Although most of my blog posts are aimed at developers, this one is really for a content editor. When we build sites and do all the checks to make sure they work well for SEO and hit AAA accessibility standards, it's easy to forget that once we're done the content editors are going to take over with the ability to destroy things :) through the rich text editor.

Scenario

As a content editor you need to display some data in your article, and it makes most sense to put in a table.

Adding a table is actually quite straightforward in Sitecore, it's not much different to doing it in Microsoft Word. You click the insert table button and choose the size you want. However the problem that often gets missed is accessibility. While a table is actually very good for a screen reader, it does need to have a bit of info on things like table headings. e.g. are the they top row, the first column or do they exist at all.

Solution

Adding heading information takes a bit of extra work, but not a lot.

1. Add you table by clicking the Insert table button and choosing the size you want.

2. Fill in your tables content

3. Right click the table and select "Table Properties"

4. Go to the Accessibility tab and set the heading rows and columns. In this example I have set the first row and first column to be marked as headings.

5. Click on and your table will be updated. If your site has styles for table headings these will also show now too.

6. Switching to HTML view will also show the correct HTML tags now being used.

An alternative approach to this, is at step 1 to pick table wizard rather than picking the size of the table. This will open the same wizard as in step 4 and allow you to specify the size of the table here too.