T’was a misty morning on Friday 22nd September, when the team at 3chillies ventured into the woods, armed to the nines with paintballs, paint bombs, smoke grenades and for many of us, the M16 gun upgrade (purely for the improved accuracy that it offered, NOT because we have a deep underlying desire to look and feel cool).  The war was a brutal one, Blue vs Red, and it didn’t take long for the shooters to realise that their XP in Call of Duty counted for nothing. An hour’s ceasefire scheduled at noon allowed sufficient time for each player ...

Magnify Your Marketing....On the morning of Tuesday 17th October 2017, the arrival of Sitecore 9 was announced!The unveiling took place during a presentation at the 2017 Sitecore Symposium (Las Vegas), a Biennial event where marketers, developers, partners, analysts, and customers come together from around the world to gain insight into all things Sitecore.Since its inception, Sitecore has led the website tech scene, and in recent years their platform has been officially recognised as both a “Leader” and “Visionary” by independent ...

Quick Links:This tutorial is Part 5 of a mini-series on Sitecore's EXM functionality.EXM Part 1 - Intro to Sitecore EXM (FTFM)EXM Part 2 - Creating Contact Lists in SitecoreEXM Part 3 - Creating an Email Campaign in SitecoreEXM Part 4 - Crafting your message in EXMTranscript:In this video were going to be continuing the process of building our email campaign, focusing specifically on email personalisation. When you look at the results of various polls and surveys carried out in recent years, many would have you believe that huge numbers ...

Without the introduction of the smartphone, and the various app stores, there would be no Candy Crush (King), Angry Birds (Rovio), WhatsApp, or Snapchat. These are just some of the many "unicorn startups" - businesses now valued at more than a billion dollars - that have taken advantage of the relatively new marketplace. But what if your business isn't a tech start-up, isn't in a period of high growth, and isn't offering a revolutionary product. Is it really realistic for an established business to build an app and expect a substantial ...

Back in October 2014, Sitecore was [for the fifth consecutive year] named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. Shortly afterwards, in December 2014, we wrote about the introduction of “Sitecore 8”, the most incredible version of the Sitecore platform to date. Fast forward 7 months and we arrive at present day, where Sitecore have been named as the leader, not just a leader, for “ability to execute” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.For those that are unfamiliar, Gartner is an ...

Many organisations use marketing automation to some degree, but few do it well. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I've received totally irrelevant, non-targeted emails from organisations I've willingly handed my contact details to. Part of the problem is that it’s too easy for marketers to set up an automated Marketing process and call it good. All too often, little planning goes into the creation of an automated marketing scheme, but this is understandable because it’s hard to know where to start. Well, here at 3chillies we ...

We are proud to announce that 3chillies have secured the Sitecore Gold Partner status for another year, fortifying our position as a leading UK Sitecore development agency.The tiered partner scheme, first developed in 2014, categorises partners based on their technical ability and experience in developing high performing Sitecore websites. It allows prospective clients to easily identify a particular partners level of skill before selecting them to perform development work for their organisation.The award will be added to 3chillies' wall ...

SASS (Syntactically awesome stylesheets)/LESS (not an abbreviation) are CSS pre-processors. If you haven't heard of them then you should jump in now and start using them.Simply put, these two languages compile down into vanilla CSS, but add many timesaving features and utilities to speed up frontend design & maintenance.As of SCSS (it's previous incarnation, used a different indentation-based syntax), both these languages are supersets of CSS. This means any valid CSS file is also a valid SASS/LESS file (though not ...

We have recently been doing a number of Sitecore upgrades. In one of them, we have upgraded the system from Sitecore 6.5 to 7.2. After the upgrade, newly published News items didn't appear on their news page. This used search, and upon examination of the Lucene indexes, the new items didn't exist in the index.Checking the Crawl logs, I noticed an entry:4260 15:57:46 FATAL [Index=sitecore_web_index] Initialization of OnPublishEndAsynchronousStrategy failed because event queue is not enabled.This was a good first clue. The ...

Computed fields are a great way of storing calculated information while Sitecore indexes your items as opposed to using more resource to calculate it on the fly for use in your sublayouts/layouts.An example for when you might want to use a computed index field is if you imagine you have a couple of blog categories and you want to provide a count of how many blog articles that refer to that category. Granted you will be able to use the Sitecore links database (which we are going to use but not at runtime) or even facets which are provided ...