Sitecore: logging via RabbitMQ

In previous post I've described why I've started to look into RabbitMQ integration. Here you could find its implementation.

Sitecore + RabbitMQ implementation

In order to send log data from Sitecore we need to extend its Logger. Sitecore uses logging system based on log4net (it is their own implementation and based not on the latest log4net sources) so we could try to use existing open source module from NuGet at least as a reference.

I took the module, replace log4net reference to Sitecore.Logging dll and made all needed changes. All this code you could find on GitHub in pre-beta version.
GitHub: Sitecore.Logger.RabbitMQ.GelfAppender

Sitecore: Logging with EKL (ElasticSearch+Logstash+Kibana)

Why not to use standard files?

Usually when you are working with Sitecore you will have standard file based logs. For development this is more that enough but when it comes to other environments it could be very nice to have all logs sentralized. Moreover need to be sure that logs are not lost in cases when something went wrong and it is easy to find information in it.
So my goal is to create solution base on EKL (ElasticSearch+Logstash+Kibana) which will get log data from Sitecore and provide possibilities to search and work with them. ()

Kibana Query interface

Sitecore: Round Image Processor

How to create round images

When you are creating a marketing site with a lot of visual on it very likely that you will need to process images that you need to display.

Fortunately, Sitecore provide you with some basic operation that you would need like resize or grayscale image. Moreover it will think for about caching images on server side after processing, so that processing of the image for specific page will happen only once ( for more information about images params see this link ).

Sitecore: Solr spell check

Extending Sitecore ContentSearch provider with Solr spell check

During one of our projects we faced with a problem that Sitecore 7 does not support out of the box some cool features of Solr like spell check and similar results , which were in great demand on one of our projects.

After some time of investigation with reflector we found out that this kind of customization would not be easy, as a lot of classes in Sitecore provider to Solr wasn't designed to support third party customization. There are a lot of internal classes and important properties hidden in private properties.

Sitecore: MVC fallback device

Implementation of layout fallback device in Sitecore MVC

Sometimes when you creating mobile versions of a site, you could decide to show some page from desktop version and do not create mobile layout for them (e.g. they are less important than other pages or not visited frequently). Sitecore has setting for that called Fallback Device. However, when you are working with MVC layout it is not really working. Nice moment over here is that it is really easy to enable it.