Delivering The Sitecore Experience

Almost every life-size Sitecore implementation has a multi-lingual aspect to it. Asking the right questions separates the men from the boys, in other words, shows how mature your digital practice truly is. Here are my top questions I commonly ask my potential clients before implementing a multi-lingual/multi-cultural implementation: Question #1: What languages are to be enabled in Sitecore? Seems like an obvious one but there can be some nuances to consider here and our job is to dig into them.  A good reason to know all the languages you will need to support up front is that certain languages (German, Japanese etc.) can and do have an impact on your creative design and UX.  Speaking of nuances, if a client says they would like to enable Chinese, it's not enough to ask if they would like both Mandarin and Cantonese. I would further ask them if they are looking for traditional or simplified Chinese, and mind you they all have different language codes that you will n

Just when I thought I have Alex Shyba's Language Fallback module all figured out, I ran into a bug related to indexing fallback versions of items. Bug (Short Version): Fallback language variants of items do not get crawled by the default SitecoreItemCrawler.  Bug Explained (Long Version) The reason is that the default crawler relies on field values stored in the database in order to index them. The Fallback Provider in the fallback module "spoofs" fallback language version of  the field values by returning the field values of the master language version of the item, and as such does not store these values in database. The result is that you only have the master language field values available for crawling. But thanks to the Sitecore community, had already been resolved  here . However, this resolution assumes that you are working with SEARCH CONTRIB / ADVANCED DATABASE CRAWLER module. I wasn't looking to introduce more uncertainty to my solution by add

SOLVE: Sitecore provided a patch to fix the issue:  https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/814090