I was lucky enough to arrive at my very first SUGCON a day early and see at bit of the Copenhagen. It’s beautiful, everyone is very friendly and the food and beer is impeccable, if you get chance to go then you definitely should.
Opening Keynote
Day 1 of SUGCON kicked off on Monday afternoon with an opening Keynote from Lars Nielsen (Sitecore Co-Founder & Chief Development Officer). This was to prove one of the most intriguing presentations of the conference as Lars revealed a number of new features coming in Sitecore 8.2.
One bug-bear for a lot of Sitecore clients is the upgrade process, Lars assured us that in 8.2 (using the Express Migration Tool) this is going to be much easier and won’t involve upgrading in multiple steps (as is currently the case) and that is should be possible to move from 6.5 > 8.2 in one automated step. This is great news for those running 6.5 and 7 solutions as it should make the process a whole lot easier and quicker.
Lars then followed this with an overview of 8.3 features (sorry It’s blury):
The most interesting for me (and clients I work with) was the Webforms for Marketers is going to be removed in 8.3 and replaced by an out of the box module, which will look something like this:
This looks a whole lot better than WFFM which as most Sitecore developers know can be a pain to customise and is pretty clunky to use.
This was reflected by the attendees as there was a round of applause from the room when this was announced. It will work in the experience editor allowing in-place editing – just like other Sitecore components, so content editors should find the experience simpler and more intuitive. There will be integrations with automation plans too:
In summary these are the Roadmap themes:
This was a great start with lots of useful info about the future releases coming up!.
Serialise all the things with Unicorn
Next up was Kam Figy, an MVP at Connective DX and the lead developer of Unicorn – a tool for serializing your Sitecore Items to disk so you can check them in to source control alongside your code.
Kam ran through a demo of Unicorn 3 which I’ve already used, but it was nice to see a full demo and find out more information about other options the we could potentially make use of.
He then showed us a project he’d done for the Sitecore hack-a-thon, which allows unicorn to sync Roles and Users as well as Items. This could be useful for future projects and is now available in Unicorn 3.2 (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Unicorn).
Kam’s talk was entertaining and he managed to handle the slightly awkward Hedgehog vs Unicorn questions afterwards pretty well too :-).
After a short break the talks split off into different tracks for the rest of the afternoon and I went with these 3:
Atomic Design Talk by Tim Braga, Design Patterns by Mike Reynolds and then Building Large Scale Sitecore solutions by Mike Edwards.
Atom Design to the MAX
Tim talked through the different approaches to building Sitecore Sites and then explained why instead of just going down to component level (as most Sitecore developers do) his team now breaking every element of a component down further into Atoms and making these separate renderings.
This allows for more control over functionality, layout and personalisation/testing on a more granular level – e.g. A/B testing on just a single button. Below is an example of this for the Hero that Collette created:
There were however some performance issues found though with Experience Editor and it does add time for development, testing and content entry. Tim went over the pros and cons and what they have carried out to try and work-around some of them:
I like some of the concepts but I’m not yet convinced this is the way to go for most Sitecore builds, unless there really is call for this level of control.
Design Patterns
I wasn’t sure what to expect with this talk but I was a bit surprised to see it was less Sitecore focused and more around Design patterns and their usage in programming in general.
Still it was good to see examples of their usage with Sitecore from Mike and the pros and cons of each approach.
Building Large Sitecore Solutions
This talk by Mike Edwards was really good. Mike gave and overview of the infrastructure and architecture of Sitecore solutions as they grow and require more CD servers and xDB provisioning.
He talked about blue/green deployments and the importance of trying to have zero downtime for client sites during deployments. He also discussed load balancing strategies and the pros and cons of the different approaches.
I’ve had first-hand experience of doing this for a few clients and it’s good to see some of the ideas we’ve used re-enforced by Mike, such as having two web databases in place so that one can be used for deployment whilst the other is live.
The architecture with xDB included looks pretty crazy but this demonstrates the number of servers and considerations involved with xDB:
After this (and a short talk by Coveo regarding their Search product) it was time to drink beer, eat food 🙂 and chat to some other Sitecore people.
There were also awards given out for the Sitecore MVPs (well done guys) and a Sitecore quiz with beer to be won.
All in all a great first day and some really informative sessions. I was really looking forward to Day 2.
