During an upgrade we needed to compare the core database with the out of the box one to confirm what changes had been made, in case they hadn’t been checked in with Unicorn.

There is a great tool called Razl that I recommend you look at. It used to provide a free trial but not any longer.

As we only wanted to do a quick diff I tried an alternative approach, using the built-in serialisation tools.

1. Set up a Sitecore instance using the target database
2. Log into Sitecore as admin
3. Right click the content editor ribbon and enable Developer
   
4. Choose the portion of the tree that you want to diff, click Serialize Tree
   
5. Download the contents of the App_Data/Serialization folder (or just the sub folder that represents the part of the tree you are interested in) it might help to clear out the Serialization folder if you aren’t using it and want to just compare it wholesale
6. Run through steps 1 – 5 using a Sitecore instance pointed at the source version of the database you want to diff (for example, the vanilla Sitecore database for your Sitecore version)
7. Use a tool such as WinMerge to compare the two folders, and hide the identical items. It is actually quite easy to navigate and diff to see the changes that have been made.
   
8. Diff any files that represent items to see what has been changed. If still unclear, use Sitecore to load up the item in question and see the changes in the content editor.
   

Happy diffing!

After an upgrade from Sitecore 9.0 to 9.1.1 we found that the Experience Editor load time had gone from 8 seconds to over a minute! The time is all spend loading Ribbon.aspx.

Sitecore have been unable so far to determine the cause of the slowdown, but various posts imply that other people have the same issue either on new or upgraded 9.1 sites, and that a good way to speed this up is to tweak the page editor ribbon options.

I spend some time looking at the built-in roles that might help.

I found that any user that inherits from sitecore\Author is extremely slow (~70 seconds). The tabs include “Optimization” which is not even needed by our site which has xDB Disabled!

It looks like this is due to sitecore\Author inheriting from Analytics roles:

• sitecore\Author
  • sitecore\Analytics Testing
  • sitecore\Analytics Personalization
  • sitecore\Sitecore Client Authoring

If I use sitecore\Sitecore Client Authoring instead then the load time goes down to 40 seconds and it no longer includes the Optimization tab.

This implies that the Optimization tab was adding about 30 seconds. But 40 seconds is still too slow.

I found that by adding the role sitecore\Sitecore Limited Page Editor in addition to either of the above roles then it loads in 15 seconds but only the ribbon contains 2 tabs – Home and Versions. However the tick boxes on the View tab are present on the Home tab.

The only issue here is that the Add Component button is greyed out. I found that this is due to it being Denied read access in the item in the core database – /sitecore/system/Settings/Security/Policies/Page Editor/Can Design

Once I removed this, the design features are available and the experience editor appears perfectly usable, and much faster.

If / when we find a better way to resolve this without limiting the features, I will update this post!