Author: Rob Ahnemann

Vercel’s “An unexpected error happened when running this build.”

Imagine a world where everything works all the time, and there are no weird-ass errors to troubleshoot. Sounds boring, yeah? Good thing it’s not a real place. Fantasies aside, sometimes things that have been working for ages just stop working. We ran into that case just recently with a project. This project has been live…


Could not find property ‘alwaysExcludeVirtualFolder’

We recently had a new developer setup their local installation of a project which had been working for quite some time now. Everything went well, until their CM instance wouldn’t come up healthy. They saw the following in their log files: Message: Could not find property ‘alwaysExcludeVirtualFolder’ on object of type: Sitecore.Links.UrlBuilders.DefaultItemUrlBuilderOptions Source: Sitecore.Kernel at…


Helpful Graph Queries for your SXA Project

If you’re working on an XM Cloud or XMPaaS project (with Edge), you’re going to have to get very comfortable with Graph. Why? Literally everything uses it. In order to get content out of Edge, or even your preview Edge endpoint, Graph is your language. It’s ok though, because it’s not stupid and it actually…


SPE-based On-demand ISR in NextJS

If you’ve made the jump to Headless with NextJS, Vercel, and Edge, you’re likely using Static Site Generation (SSG) at build time, and you’re likely going to be using Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR). SSG is useful to build some or all of the pages before your deployment is complete, thus giving users immediate access to…


Solved: Connection to your rendering host failed with a Payload Too Large

Imagine you’re walking your dog/cat/sheep/child whatever and you come across a hole in the ground. It looks like some furry critter dug a hole. Nothing weird. Now you head over to examine a hole, and out pops a dolphin. You may say WTH. That’s kinda the same response I had yesterday when I solved this…


Using PowerShell to Publish to Experience Edge

Normally, something this light wouldn’t be a blog post, but here we are. If you’ve used PowerShell to publish content before, maybe some import process or third party integration into the CMS…you know it’s pretty straight forward: Publish-Item -Path master:\content\home -Target Internet That’s not hard. Now instead of a normal DB Target, you want to…


Adding CMS-controlled JavaScript to your NextJS Site

Every site out there is going to require some level of JavaScript to be added to the pages. From Analytics to Personalization, to Media, to even some basic animations…it’s going to be there. For things like Google Tag Manager, there’s already some strong opinions on how to implement. Here’s a few: https://nextjs.org/docs/messages/next-script-for-ga https://morganfeeney.com/guides/how-to-integrate-google-tag-manager-with-nextjs https://dev.to/valse/how-to-setup-google-tag-manager-in-a-next-13-app-router-website-248p For…


SXA Branch Pages Failing to Build

One of our projects these days is all the rage (well mostly). A Headless SXA build using Experience Edge and Vercel NextJS. Learning curves aside, the project has been pretty fun. Lots of new things to figure out, problems so solve, workarounds to do… it’s a treat (not sarcastically) One thing we ran into while…


Disabling Custom Animation in Experience Editor with Spread Syntax

Today’s post is actually somewhat of a fun one! No frustrating broken things, no shenanigans with a black box to worry about. Just some simple Typescript fun. Mr. Rose is as happy as I am. So let’s take this common hero component. It has some gorgeous animations courtesy of Framer Motion. Highly recommend this library…


Experience Edge Can’t Resolve Site

I’m gonna start this off with the whole “I’m not an expert…” deal. Because frankly, I’m not an expert when it comes to Experience Edge. It’s relatively new. And I am too. Glad we got that part out of the way. So what’s the deal? Well, we were working on a new site and for…