Sitecore: How to Detect a Sitecore Website

Introduction

This post is nothing more than to satisfy people's curiosity about websites built on the Sitecore CMS platform.  Assuming you do find yourself at the login page, hacking into the content administration area is strongly discouraged using the default login of admin/b.

Approach 1

We can always attempt the very obvious feature of Sitecore which is the default login page.  This is assuming there was no separation of content authoring and content delivery environments.  Try to browse to:

http://www.domain.com/sitecore/login

If you hit the login page then you have succeeded.  The chances of hitting this page in a production environment is probably close to zero.

Approach 2

You can attempt to modify the browser URL by appending Sitecore-specific paramters and values such as:

?sc_site=(...)
?sc_lang=(en/en-ca/fr-fr/...)
?sc_mode=(normal/edit/...)

If you are able to change languages, bring up page editor, or even hit a default dummy website, then you have succeeded.

Approach 3

You can purposely modify a working URL and see if you hit the default 404 page with a URL that looks something like this:

Approach 4

With an inspection tool, look for the cookies that are accepted by the browser. Two cookies that are used by Sitecore are:

Summary

Keep in mind that developers can choose to hide or modify any of these elements if they really go the distance to hide things from nosy inspectors so none of these are fail-proof but is a good start for most sites.