Sitecore package installation never ends

The Sitecore Package Designer is a great way to share content between environments and developers. One annoying error is that on installation of a package it will never end. Upon checking the content structure you will also notice that no content has been installed.

In Sitecore 8+ you will encounter this error if the Sitecore instance is unable to connect to MongoDB. The following will usually be present throughout the logs:

Exception: System.NullReferenceException

Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Source: Sitecore.Analytics.MongoDB

Simply installing MongoDB and having it running (and configured correctly in the connection strings) will allow the package installer to complete installation as expected.

Sitecore error - Could not get pipeline: speak.client.getStyle

After a deployment on Sitecore version 8.1 the following error was appearing when attempting to load the administration launchpad.

Could not get pipeline: speak.client.getStyle (domain: )

I did a search through a clean Sitecore instance's configuration file and found the reference speak.client.getStyle section in the App_Config/Include/001.Sitecore.Speak.Important.config file.

Loading up the show config administration page on the suspect server, there were no patches from 001.Sitecore.Speak.Important.config and browsing the App_Config folder confirmed this file was disabled. Removing the .disabled file extension solved the issue.