Sitecore Developer Center - XPath Builder

Sitecore XPath Builder provided a simple tool for searching for Sitecore items by querying them.

The main advantage of XPath Builder is performing searches on production environments where there are installations of Visual Studio with Sitecore Roks.

In Sitecore versions prior to 8, X-Path Builder can be found in "Development Tools/Developer Center/Tools/XPath Builder".

All though XPath Builder has been discontinued from version 7.5, what Sitecore has done is removed to direct access to developer center form Sitecore itself. You could find it using the following URL's.

• To access developer center
• http://{site domain}/sitecore/shell/default.aspx?xmlcontrol=IDE

http://{site domain}/sitecore/shell/default.aspx?xmlcontrol=IDE.XPath.Builder

Sitecore Log Analysis

For analysing Sitecore logs you could use :  Sitecore Log Analyzer (SCLA) - Sitecore Marketplace.


1. Download the zip file, extract it and run "SCLA.Launcher.exe".

2. Browse to the Sitecore applications "Logs" folder.

3. Hit analyse.

4. You can select errors, warning or information and filter as required.

5. You could also obtain information on Sites health information from this. The timeline provided at the bottom provides indication on when each event occurred for all log files uploaded.

Setting Up Sitecore Manually

This article takes you through a step by step process in setting up Sitecore in your local environment.

*It is assumed that Github is used as the source control.

1. Download and extract Sitecore project folder.

2. Copy the license file to the data folder in Sitecore. The data folder is usually App_Data. But this folder could be relocated with te following configuration in a config file.

3. Create a IIS application. Point the physical path to the website folder inside Sitecore project folder.

4. Set "NetworkService" as the user for application pool.

5. Add a host file entry for your application.

6. Provide permissions to the "NetworkSerivce" user for the Sitecore root directory.

7. Set up (attach) all databases to SQL server.

8. Update the Sitecore ConnectionString.config in App_config folder to set the database paths to the above server.

9. Add Sitecore license. create a folder "data" in Sitecore website folder and add the license file. This is the default data folder unless changed in the following setting in Web.Config file.

<sc.variable name="dataFolder" value="/data" />