We have a website featuring Sitecore 8.1 with multiple content editors. Is there any way to log their activity, as in listing the actions they have performed in terms of editing/publishing/unpublishing?
We had a problem last week which I suspect being caused by someone unpublishing the wrong item, but I need to make sure this is the case, or at least I would like this ability in the future.
Do I need to create my own event-triggered logging?
There's nothing fully out of the box to provide those reports in Sitecore. You can take a look at the Sitecore Audit Trail module which will log all the "editor action" audit information into a separate log4net appender. You can find more information on the module in this blog post, but note that the module is only mark as compatible to Sitecore 7.5, it should not be hard to make this work with Sitecore 8.1, namely updating the appender config since the log4net config is now within the <sitecore> node in config.
Sitecore does log content editor actions out of the box in the normal log files (in Data\logs), they start with "AUDIT" so you can find them. It logs things such as items being saved, publishes starting, etc. Do a search in the log files to find them.
You can get these saved to a separate log file for easier review: https://sdn.sitecore.net/scrapbook/how%20to%20make%20sitecore%206%20write%20audit%20log%20to%20its%20own%20file.aspx
This still works in Sitecore 8 except the setting is in App_Config/Sitecore.config now.
You can use Sitecore Advanced System Reporter
Sitecore 6 ships with a very useful function called My Locked Items. At times, though, admin users may want to see all locked items, not just those locked by them. I wrote a little application to do just that. Then I thought of making it more generic, so that one could create other type of reports easily. The result is a little framework which allows to create many types of reports in very short time. In this module I provide this framework together with many useful example reports like:
items modified updated in the last X days
items that have more than X children
items that are publishable but either do not exist or have a different version in the web
database.
items that are based on a particular template
items with validation errors
which templates have been linked to a workflow
locked items
publishable items with broken links
audit information
errors in the log files
items that have stayed in the same workflow state for more than X days
and more.
You can now also parametrise those reports, save them as links in the desktop, export them, or even create a scheduled task that emails some of them automatically. In addition, you can also apply commands to the items reported.
You can download the module from : https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/A/Advanced_System_Reporter.aspx
Module is available for Sitecore 6.4 to 8. I don't know if has the functionality you look but you can customize it.
You can check this blogpost how to extend it: http://www.seanholmesby.com/sitecore-auditing-with-the-advanced-system-reporter/
Update
Install the module
Run the module and choose reports like in picture.
Run the report
View the report or export it like csv, excel or xml .
Related
The end result:
After publishing an item, all versions will be visible in the WEB DB, instead of the default behaviour of only having the latest item version.
I'm using Sitecore 8.2.170407
After reading this article, I tried to do several things:
Remove both RemoveOtherVersions and PublishTestingVersions processors by doing a <patch:delete />. That did not work
Add my own patch file, which inherits Sitecore.Publishing.Pipelines.PublishVersion.Processors.RemoveOtherVersions and hides/overrides the base Process method. The new method will do nothing.
Image of patch class and Image of patch config
That didn't work either.
Tried removing the whole <publishVersion> pipeline, but that gave an exception when trying to publish an item.
I've not been able to find a solutions anywhere else. I know a similar question has been asked here, but that was in Sitecore 6
Have any of you been in the same situation before? How did you solve the issue?
If you need more information, please let me know.
Thanks in advance
You can't.
The linked answer you provide is still valid. Sitecore "web" database (any database which is a publishing target) stores one and only one version. To modify this, you're going to need to reinvent your own publishing process.
Based on your clarification, it seems what you want to use is standard Sitecore versioning with specified publish start dates to put up a particular version.
All of the versions would live in your master database, and you would regularly run publishes through the publishing agent or some other means in order to send the appropriate version to the web database on the correct date.
Your authors can preview what the page would look like on a particular date using the date picker in the preview mode.
We have upgraded Sitecore to 7.1, but we are experiencing a problem with publishing.
We create a new item in the master database in English, then we publish this item, switch to the web database to check if it's there, which it is, however... The item does not have a version! Therefore the item is not displaying on the website.
Any ideas as to what could be causing this?
Thanks.
I was having the same issue with Sitecore 8+ where i was able to add language specific content but couldn't publish it. Figured out how to resolve it
1) First Language needs to be registered in \sitecore\system\languages by defining the language to be use.
2) Publish these language items first before publishing content else the behavior will be the same.
3) After publishing languages, then publish the content. In the publish window you will see the language under "Publishing language" section and select the language to publish the content.
Make sure that parent items have a version as well and are also in final state if they are part of a workflow.
I had problems with publishing because I didn't have a language version in one of my parents. In my case it was a parent folder under the content node.
Hope it helps.
Al
Please try republishing your entire site. In some cases, a part of the tree hierarchy might be missing in the Web DB, due to which, publishing the child nodes wouldnt work. Republishing the site can eliminate this chance.
This has been resolved.
It turns out that the SQL server did not have enough space for a full publish. A full publish had been attempted and failed due to the lack of space on the SQL server. subsequently this had corrupted the database.
We had to restore an earlier version of the database and ensure the SQL server had plenty of space for the full publish to finish.
I ran into this issue earlier with my Sitecore 7.2 upgrade. The key here is to ensure the items, templates and layouts (associated with the item) all has appropriate language+versions in master db. In my case, we were also using Partial Language fallback and needed to make that was working proper as well.
Once you identify the item (with missing versions), add them and republish the whole item. For few template types I noticed Sitecore was still not publishing properly. Ex: Items based off Sublayout Folder template. The fix was easy in this case as I changed the template type to Folder and republished.
Also switch to web database in sitecore client and ensure you are able to preview the item (from web db)
Hope this helps.
Please help me how to copy a page from the existing application of Apex to another work space of Apex application.
You can't do this out of the box.
Beside workspace ids, the application id also matters. If you have 2 different workspaces and the same application in it but with different IDs, this further complicates things.
What you could always do is export the complete application, import it but use a different id so you don't overwrite the existing one, and then create a new page as a copy of the newly imported application's page.
Antoher way would be to edit the exported PAGE SQL file but, let me stress this, this is not recommended. And as so graciously stated in the OTN forums now and again, if you'd require support with an application/apex issue and they would find you were messing around in the sql files you'd not get support there. Only do this when you UNDERSTAND and KNOW what you're about to do! If you alter the code without understanding what you are doing you could be in a far worse situation than the one you started in. Any other case, follow the application export/import/copy line.
Anyway, I was in a position where workspace IDs differed but application IDs not. In this case altering the exported file is quite trivial and requires editing only 1 (one) line and concerns this piece of code:
begin
-- Assumes you are running the script connected to SQL*Plus as the Oracle user APEX_040200 or as the owner (parsing schema) of the application.
wwv_flow_api.set_security_group_id(p_security_group_id=>nvl(wwv_flow_application_install.get_workspace_id,27000294100083787867));
end;
/
This is one of the first pieces of code in the exported page file. As you can see, the workspace ID is set here. If attempted to be imported into an application (even if the app id matches the one you're trying to import to) you'd get an error. Change the ID to the one matching the workspace however and it'll work. Of course, you need to know the workspace IDs, and you can find these by executing this select on your apex environment(s?)
select workspace, workspace_display_name, workspace_id from apex_workspaces
Some good advice:
If you're still in the start-up phase of your apex installation, you might want to make sure that your workspace ids are identical. For example, with a test and production environment having identical workspace and application ids is very interesting. You'd have 2 instances (2 database installations on 2 different servers), but want the IDs to be the same.
To make sure of this, you can EXPORT the workspace from one environment and then IMPORT it into the other one. You can do that from the instance administration in apex, ie the internal workspace.
This is now supported in APEX version 4.2 - per Oracle doc...
7.3.4 Copying a Database Application Page
You can copy a page from the current application or from another application. During the copy process, you can also copy shared components or change mappings to shared components in the target application.
To copy a page:
Navigate to the application you want to copy to:
Navigate to the Workspace home page.
Click the Application Builder icon.
Select an application.
Select a page.
The Page Definition appears.
In Tree view:
Under Page Rendering, select the page name.
Right-click and select copy.
In Component view:
Under Page, click the Copy icon.
For Copy Page Option, select one of the following:
Page in this application
Page in another application
Follow the on-screen instructions.
In APEX 4.0 to copy a page from any Application:
Edit any page in your Application
Hit the Createâ–¼ button
Choose New page as a copy
I have a requirement to allow users of the web site to see the current publish version of the item (which has passed through workflow) + the previous versions + the version scheduled to publish in future.
So when the use visit the content item on the web site they will be presented with tabs to: previous , current and future version of the item.
I have seen some articles how to intercept publishing pipeline but still cannot evaluate if this scenario is possible.
There is no native way to allow multiple versions to be published live at a given time. This comes down to how the publishing process works for Sitecore. At a high-level, let me explain:
The authoring environment which uses the master database contains 0-n versions of each item. When a user decides to publish a piece of content, only the latest version marked as "final" will be published to the publishing target database, e.g. usually the web database. The publishing target database (e.g. web) will always only have ONE VERSION of a given item, unlike the master database.
Let me say that again:
The front-end public-facing website's database
only has ONE VERSION of a given content item at any time.
Since you indicated the front-end of the site needs to show three versions coming from:
Previous
Current
Future
This means that the pure requirement of showing a "future" version to be published means your site would not use a typical master-to-web publishing model and would instead need to run in "live mode" which runs from the master database. As I said, you would not even publish at all and would render content as you edit/save it.
So, for this reason, you'd need to code your front-end presentation component(s) which generate the tabs to query the item and get the current version, the previous version (assuming it was "final"), and a previous version (assuming its "final").
We have a need to programmatically access the layouts/ templates of one sitecore site and move it to another site under different folders basically the intent is to restructure the existing site which is already in production.
Could anyone tell me how do we go about it?
Instead of writing a custom "one-time-use" tool for this, I would recommend you to get advantage of a standard "Transfer Items" application. You can find it in Sitecore Control Panel: go to Database > Transfer Items to Another Database.
So, what you basically need to do:
plug in the master database from the target new site to this older site, like "master_new" or something. This will require the web.config modification. The section on SDN about publishing targets should have a guideline how to do this
run the "Transfer Items" application, select the templates / layouts you needs on the first page, select this "master_new" database as a target database and the place in the content tree to transfer to on the second one
run the actual transfer
If your layouts / templates are groups into folders, this process will take the minimal time - much less comparing to creating your custom script...
UPDATE: Some sample code how to trigger this application programmatically:
UrlString url = new UrlString(UIUtil.GetUri("control:TransferToDatabase"));
Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.ShowModalDialog(url.ToString());
I would look into using Sitecore Powershell Extensions (look at marketplace). It is a perfect fit for a usecase like this.