Daniel Ovaska
Feb 14, 2020
visibility 5190
star star star star star star
(3 votes)

Fix problems with edit mode

Episerver edit mode normally works great. But sometimes a developer manages to crash it.  I'll go through the most common issues you can check for to make it work again

  1. WebSockets not enabled on IIS
    Easy to fix by adding the feature to IIS. If you forget this you will get a warning in edit mode and some newer functionality like support for projects won't work. 


  2. Parts of the nuget package for edit mode was lost along the way
    Double check that you have the relevant zip files below modules on the server. Sometimes that get lost in the deploy process somewhere.

    If they don't exist on your development environment, reinstall the relevant nuget packages.
  3. Make sure edit mode hasn't been removed
    Sometimes you do this if you have a separate editor server. It can look similar to this in webconfig. Notice that the allow tag has been removed. Common symphoms are that you get a 404 or 403 after logging in. 
  4. Custom properties
    If edit mode doesn't work properly or goes blank for some content types, check in admin mode if there are some custom properties on them. Try removing them in development environment to see if that is what causes the issue. Remove old properties that isn't used anymore on that content type.

  5. Check edit mode for js errors
    Use Chrome developer tools or similar and check console. This can give you a good hint what isn't working. Often custom properties like above.

  6. PropertyList and Url properties can't be saved
    A common problem if you add a Url property to a property list is that you forget to handle the json transformation properly. Add some attributes to handle the Url property correctly. If you don't, saving the property list won't work correctly. 
    [JsonProperty]
    [JsonConverter(typeof(UrlConverter))]
    [Display(Name = "Link1", Order = 200)]
    public virtual Url UrlLink { get; set; }
    ​

    Hope that helps someone with troubleshooting if edit mode gives you a hard time. 

    Happy coding!

    PS If you blog and use web[dot]config somewhere in your blog, cloudflare will block you from creating that blog. DS

Feb 14, 2020

Comments

error Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Optimizely Graph - Provisioning, User Management & Developer Instances

Upgrading to Optimizely CMS 13 marks a major architectural shift as Optimizely Graph takes over as the central query and delivery engine, retiring...

Scott Reed | Sep 28, 2026

An (unofficial) MCP server for Optimizely Data Platform (ODP)

I wanted to ask Claude some questions about session setup data in Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) without writing GraphQL every time. There's no...

Jacob Pretorius | Sep 28, 2026

Admin UI for Optimizely SaaS CMS Integrations Without Extra Tools: Preview-Based Dashboards, OCP UI Extensions and Keeping Them Private

On PaaS we extended the CMS UI with custom admin panels; SaaS CMS has no such hooks. Here is a workaround: an admin UI for external content...

Szymon Uryga | Sep 27, 2026 |

Personalisation in CMS 13 when you go headless: variations in the CMS, decisions in Experimentation

Back in February I wrote about personalisation in CMS 13 using Audiences . Everything in that post still holds, with one condition I should have ma...

Minesh Shah (Netcel) | Sep 24, 2026