Error in Firefox When Trying to Insert a New Page Using a Page Editor
Vasiliy Fomichev
In Errors, Sitecore Fix Posted September 12, 2014
I am the quality assurance machine! This is the third bug I found in Sitecore 7.2 within about a month. Am I going for record here or what? The following article provides an overview of a bug that was found in Sitecore 7.2 rev. 140526. The issue is related to inserting a page using a Page Editor in Firefox.
On the way to the Sitecore Symposium in Las Vegas, I was testing Sitecore – having multiple sessions with the same user, which required me logging into the CMS in multiple browsers. A large part of my testing was supposed to take place in Page Editor, and things were going well until I tried inserting a page in Page Editor, or as some may call it, Experience Editor. After contacting Sitecore support, they confirmed that it was indeed a bug and sent me a patch. After the Symposium I rushed to write this blog post to once again spreading the word and hopefully saving hours of frustration.
JavaScript Errors in Sitecore Page Editor When Inserting a New Page
Insert Page button in Sitecore Page Editor (Firefox Error)
While being logged into a local development instance of Sitecore 7.2 I switched to the Page Editor. One of my test cases included simply creating a page. This seemed like a trivial task, and things were looking good in IE11 and Chrome, but the Page Editor seemed to choke when I tried inserting a new page using Firefox. After clicking the Insert Page button, specifying a name for the page and clicking OK to insert, the Insert Page popup went away, but nothing else happened. The browser remained on the same page versus navigating to the newly created one. After checking the Content Editor, it appeared that the new page has actually been created.
An interesting fact was that after clicking the Insert Page button in Firefox, the Insert Page popup would only come up intermittently. Sometimes after clicking the Insert Page button nothing would happen.
After narrowing down the issue to the Firefox browser, I decided to make sure this bug was not caused by any of my custom code I had running on the instance. With the magic of Sitecore Installation Manager, I quickly spun out a new instance of Sitecore 7.2. In a just a few moments I had a fully running Sitecore instance. Holding fingers crossed I logged into the Page Editor mode using Firefox, and tried creating a page. Unfortunately, I got the same problem, which told me it was time to contact Sitecore Support.
How to Fix the Firefox Bug Related to Inserting a New Page in Sitecore Page Editor
Sitecore support quickly got back to me saying that they were able to replicate the error, which they had registered as a bug, and that they would get back to me shortly. Being true to their word, they got back to me within 24 hours with the following solution:
- Download and drop the Sitecore.Support.404378 assembly into the /bin folder of your website
- Open the /App_Config/Commands.config file, comment out the following line:
<command name="webedit:new" type="Sitecore.Shell.Applications.WebEdit.Commands.New,Sitecore.Client"/>
and insert the following line instead:
<command name="webedit:new" type="Sitecore.Support.Shell.Applications.WebEdit.Commands.New,Sitecore.Support.404378"/>
For added convenience, I have created a Sitecore 7.2 Firefox Page Editor Patch.files package that can be installed using the Sitecore Update Installation Wizard – /sitecore/admin/updateinstallationwizard.aspx (had to zip it as WordPress does not allow uploading .update files). While you are installing the update, check out the pictures from the Sitecore Simposium 2014 in Las Vegas. Cheers!
Hopefully, this post will save many hours of frustration or days of troubleshooting to others, so please share this article, as many developers will thank you. Also remember to comment on this article, especially if you were affected by the same bug and this fix worked for you; please mention the version and revision of Sitecore you experienced the same problem on. Finally, give back by blogging, tweeting, and posting on Sitecore forums about any bugs and fixes you find yourself!