Today I faced an issue with Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM). We had taken a copy of a customer’s system and were trying to test some changes we’d made to it. This involved making sure that the system sent email correctly, and we wanted it to send them to a mail-trap, rather than sending them to actual users. However, when I tried to change the mail server settings, the forms of the system seemed to continue to try to use the customer’s live SMTP server. This was surprising. Continue reading “Sitecore’s “Send Email Message” save action retains mail server settings”
WebFormsForMarketers
Enable SSL for sending emails on Sitecore
I was asked to use a GMail server to send emails from Sitecore with. This is actually a pretty reasonable request – but GMail only supports connections over TLS or SSL. Configuring Web Forms for Marketers to use this was proving … interesting, until I found this excellent article by Mark Cassidy. Continue reading “Enable SSL for sending emails on Sitecore”
Annoying Sitecore Email Settings
It would appear that Sitecore’s mail settings are, mostly, in a handful of settings in web.config. At one level, they are, and a simple patch file can be used to set them for your system. For example… Continue reading “Annoying Sitecore Email Settings”
Web Forms For Marketers blows up if Analytics disabled
This one was a real Sherlock Holmes case. The site I’ve been working on has Azure App Insights monitoring it, and on the live site we started to see lots of exceptions that hadn’t appeared in testing.
Digging into the exceptions, I noticed that:
- The exception was System.Web.HttpUnhandledException with an inner System.NullReferenceException
- The method throwing the exception was Sitecore.Form.Core.Ascx.Controls.SimpleForm.OnAddInitOnClient, which is part of the Web Forms for Marketers suite.
- The user agent was always Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) – so it was Googlebot making the request. There’s no reason that should cause an exception though!
I realised after a while that Googlebot is a robot, and so is excluded from analytics, so this problem probably had the same cause as the exceptions our testing was starting to throw up. The OnAddInitOnClient method isn’t one of mine, though – it’s part of Sitecore’s Web forms for Marketers – so I opened up Reflector and down the rabbit hole I went… Continue reading “Web Forms For Marketers blows up if Analytics disabled”
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