In a current project we are using Solr for the first time. We ran into several problems which all of you may had. Most of them are well documented and a solution is easy to find. This blog post describes an issue with non UTC dates which was not that easy to find. My use case was to build a news application where each item has a field Publication Date. The date is stored in Solr as follow (in UTC): "publication_date_tdt" : "2016-09-15T00:00:00Z"…

One missing feature in Sitecore is the ability to limit the number of components which can be binded to a placeholder. By default, an author can add as many components to a placeholder as he wants. But sometimes there are restrictions in the layout, where more than a specific number of components would break it. Let's say we have a teaser row to add components. In a three-column layout, the maximum of allowed teasers would be three. There are already good solutions available for this (e.g. this one here…

Habitat is an example architecture from Sitecore. With this modular architecture, everything is encapsulated and separated into modules, where each module is a Visual Studio project. A great introduction to Habitat can be found in this blog post by Anders Laub. Encapsulation also means, that a module doesn't know other modules. When using dependency injection, you need to configure all dependencies somewhere. And this place needs to know every implementation, which is not possible with Habitat. Because each module only knows itself, only the module itself can configure its dependencies.…

In Sitecore MVC, a view rendering consists of a (Razor) view and optionally a model. The model has a definition item under /sitecore/layout/Models and must be referenced in the field Model of the rendering definition item. Now when Sitecore is loading a view rendering, it starts the pipeline mvc.getModel to create an instance of the referenced model and passes the model to the view. By default Sitecore creates the model instance with Activator.CreateInstance(), which means that the class needs a default constructor and doesn't allow constructor…

I am very happy to announce that I was awarded as a Sitecore Technology Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for the second time in a row. This year, Sitecore has nominated 177 Technology, 35 Digital Strategist and 9 Commerce MVPs. Thank you Sitecore for this award and the confidence in the community. It's a honour. Also I want to congratulate all the other MVPs and thank you for all your work, support and contributions. If you want to know more about the MVP program or become one yourself, check out the…