Sitecore Made Easy

 I recently came across an issue with our CMS users getting elevated access permissions even after they were moved to a lower-level role. We use OKTA as our identity provider and use federated authentication to integrate Sitecore with OKTA for staff login. The OKTA group memberships are mapped to Sitecore roles using claims mapping to manage user roles in Sitecore. This was working fine for a long time until recently when we started noticing changing user roles in OKTA have no impact on the user permissions in Sitecore. I started troubleshooting by monitoring the network traffic during the login redirect, capturing the JWT token to inspect the claims we are receiving from OKTA. Once the user's group membership in OKTA has changed, I can see the new groups values in the claims. So, the issue has to be on the Sitecore end with claims to roles mapping. After further investigating into the code which hasn't changed in months, I looked into what else has changed. We did upgrade our ...

Sitecore introduced webhooks in Sitecore 10.3 release. The webhooks allows you to get real-time notifications on Sitecore server-side events to other systems. What are webhooks? Webhooks are basically HTTP call-backs. These are automated messages used for communication between two systems when an event is triggered on one system and the other system needs to be notified of the event. The webhooks payload usually consists of a lightweight message about the event in JSON or XML format. What is the need for webhooks in Sitecore? This is one of the features first introduced in Sitecore XM Cloud and later incorporated into Sitecore XP release. In a composable DXP with a SaaS based CMS like XM Cloud, we need an easy way to communicate with external systems using a plug and play framework like webhooks. This allows the CMS to notify the external systems of the server-side events happening at Sitecore so that the systems can take necessary actions of their own. An example of this is to clear e...

  I have been a Sitecore developer for five years and worked on various Sitecore projects, yet every time I take the certification exam it makes me nervous. From my conversations with the other Sitecore developers I worked with, even the most experienced Sitecore developers are nervous about failing the certification exam. They try to avoid taking the exam unless absolutely necessary. A few reasons for this could be, The exam is too expensive to fail. Most employers will only reimburse the fee for successful certification attempts. The score required to pass the exam is quite high (80%) compared to your academic exams.  The Sitecore training modules for exam competencies can be expensive. Not everyone gets a chance to work on the latest version of Sitecore. The exam competencies include areas of Sitecore you never had a chance to work on. In this blog post I will share my most recent experience of preparing and successfully completing the Sitecore .NET 10 Developer certificati...