What do you mean you can’t fetch that item by its path?

There are some things in Sitecore that you just take for granted will work. Loading items is a good example of this. I’ll admit that user error can get in your way, but usually if you can see an item in the content tree, you can write code that will load it without issues. So I’ll admit I was pretty confused when I came across a scenario recently where this did not appear to work correctly. In case anyone else hits this challenge, here’s what happened:

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Why are my pages under /services/ broken?

This is one of those issues where I feel like I should have worked it out faster than I did. Computers are relentlessly logical. If you tell them to ignore something, they’re going to ignore it, even if that does confuse your content editors…

A fast query edge case that might bite you

There’s been a bit of discussion (I might even go as far as to say ranting 😉 ) on the subject of not using “fast query” in your website code recently. I’m a supporter of this idea – but I came across an issue recently that points out why it’s not always easy to be confident that you’re not making use of it indirectly…

So, for the benefit of Google:

What do you mean it’s not editable any more?

So while battling the jetlag that hit me pretty hard getting back from Sitecore Symposium, this issue came popped up in my bug queue last week. QA reported that a certain component on a test page was not allowing one field to be edited. It had worked in the past, but the behaviour suddenly changed so that one field no longer got the “you can edit this” overlay in Experience Editor. It took me longer than it should have to work out why…

Get your Sitecore Simposium slides

I did a talk about measuring site performance at Sitecore Symposium this year. It seemed to go pretty well, I think:

Community advice for (conference) speakers

So Sitecore Sitecore Symposium is very nearly upon us again. And this year (for the first time!) I’ll be presenting a session. [Unless it gets moved again: Day 2 (Tuesday 9th), 16:15 in Swan 2 – “Measure if you want to go faster” – A developer’s introduction to improving performance by measuring your code]

When this year’s speakers first found out that their talk abstracts had been accepted, there was a bit of discussion on the Sitecore Slack about things speakers might want to know or do. And I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while, because there were quite a few things I saw that were worth sharing to help anyone else who’s looking forward to their first opportunity to speak…

Bonus chatter: AMP pages and code snippet hyperlinks…

Here’s a quick memory jogger for me: If you try to validate the AMP versions of blog pages, you may get this error from Google: Invalid URL for HTML attribute 'href' in tag 'a'. What does it actually mean?