My Sitecore SUGCON 2023 Takeaways – Day 2

> DAY ONE - If you haven't read about Day One you can read it here.

SUGCON DAY 2

The 2nd Day of SUGCON started bright an early so after a quick breakfast and cup of tea at the hotel I headed down to the first session I’d planned to see.

Rob’s session is one of the key sessions I really didn’t want to miss this year. A few clients I’ve spoken to recently (and other Sitecore Dev’s I’ve chatted to at SUGCON so far) are facing this challenge:

‘How do we move to XM Cloud from XP and what do we need to consider?’

– so I was keen to learn from Rob’s experiences.

Migrating advanced Sitecore implementations to XM Cloud – Rob Habraken

Rob started with telling us the differences with XM Cloud and explaining how publishing works differently (given you publish to the Edge):

Rob then shared a typical XP implementation diagram and showed how XP Differs as integrations and functionality is moved into the head application:

He then discussed what is included and not included in XM Cloud in detail. Martin shared some similar slides the day before, but I think these were a little clearer so I didn’t include them in the previous post:

This was also a pretty cool comparison of XP vs XM Cloud equivalent features:

Rob then discussed the Migration approach to XM Cloud. There was a lot of really useful info here about things to consider and how to get your project prepared for the migration and how to tackle it:

Next up was the the different development approaches and workflow. I’ve talked about these before but I didn’t know much about option 3 at all. I guess most Sitecore developers (especially in a small team) will use option 1, but option 3 is a really good approach for being able to use local content for your development without having to push it to XM Cloud:

Rob then went on to explain in detail about how Content Resolvers don’t work if they are dynamic and only static ones do. It’s possible to use some out of the box ones or implement your own GraphQL Content Resolver:

This is an example of Bread crumbs in XM Cloud and a GraphQL search query:

Rob finished his talk with a summary of the benefits of XM Cloud. The shift in Development domain and thinking is the tricky part for a lot of Sitecore Developers I feel:

Rendering your data in headless – 101 different ways
– Mike Edwards

I’ve known Mike for a number of years now and he’s always an good speaker so I was looking forward to Mike sharing his learnings from his headless journey.

Mike started by lamenting how things used to be easy in the World of MVC and server-side development and then with all the JQuery and JS frameworks things became pretty bloated.

Things have moved on a lot now in FE development though and there are now many different options for building Headless websites in Sitecore, some of these I’m aware of or have experimented with – Others I’ve not heard of, such as ‘Island Architecture’.

SPAs bring their own set of problems in terms of page load times and indexability so Mike went into Hydration and Partial Hydration techniques and approaches that try to solve these issues:

Then Mike explained more about Partial Hydration examples and Island Architecture. Island Architecture lets you create your web app with pure HTML and CSS for all the static content but then add in regions/placeholders of dynamic content to support interactive ‘islands’ of content. Given the rest of the page is static it downloads really quickly and is available to use faster.

Mike then covered Resumability, Edge/Serverless and tools such as Storybook and Hydration Payload.

There are some Challenges and limitations which need to be re-address:

Finally Mike ended with saying that this is the future and we need to embrace the new world.

It was a really interesting talk and gave me a lot to think about and research further. The following talks were 15 minute lightning talks until lunch.

Leverage Sitecore Connect for Sitecore CDP – Sarah O’Reilly

I’d heard a fair bit about Connect but I’ve not really seen much about how it actually works. So I was looking forward to this session

Sarah took us through an example of using Connect to import user segment data from CDP into Google Ads.

Once the export was setup to build from CDP the steps were then configured in Connect to sync to Google Ads:

There are tons of Apps supported and different recipes defined and it was impressive to see the options for building logic such as if statements / for loops data mapping and manipulation all within Connect.

This was an insightful session and really interesting to see how it works. I can see how it could be used to help with migrating to XM Cloud from XP or another CMS platform.

Sitecore components explained for your marketers – Ugo Quaisse

The next session was about the Sitecore Components builder in Pages in XM Cloud. I’ve heard a bit about this but not seen much of it in detail. I was hoping to see a full demo of it. I guess at the session was only 15 minutes there wasn’t time, but I still learned quite a bit about how it works.

The Component Builder can be used without any development or code required at all. First Themes are setup with colours, fonts and breakpoints configured.

Then datasources are setup and mapped from either a url or json or GraphQL.

Then the components ‘look and feel’ – layout, dimensions and sizing can be configured in the Builder. This looks pretty neat. Then versioning and publishing is setup for the Component.

Lastly some details were shared around the benefits for digital creatives, it’s possible to get Sites built very quickly and easily using Components Builder.

Leveraging XM Cloud APIs and Webhooks to powerup integrations – Ramkumar Dhinakaran & Elakkuvan Rajamani

After lunch it was time for another session, this time on Webhooks. The use-case here was the XM Cloud Lighthouse Integration which would do an automated quality check of pages using Webhooks and report on it.

Depending on the integration required it might not be best to use a Webhook:

Quite a lot of detail was shared with how this all works and integrates.

There were some links and takeaways shared at the end.

Sitecore Search: Real case PoC – Sebastian Winslow & Jesper Balle

The 2nd to last session for the day was on the Sitecore search (based on Discover) which I was keen to learn about more as I didn’t know much about how it worked.

CEC looks pretty powerful and can be used to manage search, performance is key and widgets can be configured for search and catalog:

Some dev resources and admin info were shared:

The use case for search was a property Site. There is still some features that need to be built.

Some info was then provided on Triggers to get the content, Request and document extractors to process and manipulate the content.

Search API endpoints, results response, API Explorer and ability to refine the widgets.

It’s early days and the search SDK is still not there yet but it’s coming. Be careful with how much content you try and index when testing but there are some significant benefits to using it.

This was a really informative session and gave me all the info I was looking for about how to go about implementing search.

Experiences with Content Hub One – Journey of relaunching our Usergroup website – Katharina Luger & Christian Hahn

Then it was time for my last session of the day on how the Sitecore User Group Germany rebuilt their site as an SPA using Content Hub One.

The slide below was probably the simplest comparison I saw all SUCON of the differences between XM Cloud and Content Hub One.

There are 7 Steps to component creation:

Lastly there were some challenges faced.

This was a really great session and I’m looking forward to working with Content Hub One in the future.

Virtual Closing Keynote by Scott Hanselman

There was then an really entertaining and insightful talk from Scott Hanselman. He had some great advice, wisdom and stories to tell to us and I think everyone in the room was pretty captivated by his talk.

With that it was the end of SUCON 2023, there was a big round of applause for all the organisers. These events take a hell of a lot of organising and a real commitment from everyone involved.

It was time to go and have a few beers and reflect on what was a another brilliant SUGCON.

Hopefully this is useful info for anyone that couldn’t attend this year or had too many beers and forgot what they learned :-).

Sitecore Technology MPV Award 2023

This week I was privileged to be presented with the Sitecore Technology MVP award for the 6th year in a Row .

There are only 241 MVPs Worldwide and just 8 Technology MVPs in the UK (137 Worldwide), all of which have been awarded for:

“demonstrating outstanding engagement and support for the global Sitecore community”.

It’s a great Community to be involved in and I’ve enjoyed organising and presenting at the Manchester Sitecore User Group over the past year, meeting other Sitecorian’s and sharing my knowledge on this Blog, YouTube, Twitter, SSE and Slack.

You can see all the 2023 MVPs in the Directory here: https://mvp.sitecore.com/Directory

Why become an MVP?

There are many benefits to being an MVP, here are some of them:

Being viewed as a global Sitecore expert & community leader
Access to early product release / resources / product teams and kick-off webinars
Access to MVP discussion forums
Regional MVP meetings
MVP Summit after Symposium (insight to product / company strategy)
Discounts for SUGCON & Symposium

You can read more about the MVP programme here.

Thinking about becoming an MVP?

This is a really useful SSE post on the kind of activities you need to be involved in if you would like to become an Sitecore MVP and this Blog Post is a great resource.
You can also reach out to previous and existing MVPs on Twitter/Slack etc and I’m sure they will help guide you or answer any questions you have.

There is also an mentor programme which may be something to look at if you feel you need further guidance and help on your Journey.

Congrats to all 2023 MVPs and thanks to Sitecore and the MVP Team for their support and assistance over this year. Here’s to another year of Sitecore’ing ?.

Using ChatGPT to write SPE

Catchy title huh? it Rhymes and everything.
Anyway, my Twitter timeline has been non stop about ChatGPT this, and ChatGPT that for the past few weeks – and I’ve seen it doing some pretty cool stuff.

I also keep hearing how it’s going to make Software Developers redundant, so it got me thinking about something I do every few days as a Sitecore Developer:

“Can ChatGPT write some decent Sitecore PowerShell Extensions scripts?”

TLDR: Yes it can. Not terrible anyway. Read on to find out more.

Wait, what is ChatGPT?

Chances are that you already know what it is else you probably wouldn’t be reading this, but just in case – ChatGPT is an impressive AI Chatbot created by OpenAI (backed by Microsoft & others) that can take inputs and provide some very comprehensive and usually pretty accurate answers.

The Tests – How did ChatGPT do?

So I fired up my browser, created an account on https://chat.openai.com/ and after waiting for it to become less busy for a while, I got started with asking for some SPE scripts:

ChatGPT Test 1 – Create me an Sitecore item

I thought I’d begin with something fairly simple – creating an item, it seemed like a nice place to start. It’s often something I need to script (perhaps usually to create a bunch of items). This is what came back:

My Score = 6/10

Other than the fact it seems to have tried to import SIF at the top of the script!?, Initially I was quite impressed as it looked pretty close to what I would write myself.
However when I tried to run the script in the SPE ISE (using the Sample Item Template Id) it was clear that it had some of the parameters incorrect. It had miss-understood how to use the -ItemType and had also tried to pass -Template in as a parameter and there is no such thing so it wasn’t quite right but not a bad effort. After correcting these issues this is the final working script:

ChatGPT Test 2 – Unlock all Items for a User

This time I went for something a little more tricky, unlocking items is something I’ve quite often need to do in the past – where users have gone on Holiday and left an lot of items locked for example. Here is what it came up with:

My Score = 9/10

Again it tried to import SIF at the top of the script, but other than that it actually created some working code. Amazingly similar to Marek’s SSE answer:

I was able to just remove the SIF imports at the top and run it and it seemed to work. It took a while (as I have a lot of test content locally) and there is no logging to show what happened but it didn’t error and did complete. Here is the working script:

ChatGPT Test 3 – Remove all old versions of an Item

This time I tried something I’ve had to do recently and took quite some time to write as was fairly complex. I wanted a script to remove all but the 10 most recent versions of an item but to always keep item versions that are 3 months old or less as well. Here is the script it came up with:

My Score = 3/10

These more complex scenarios and perhaps where ChatGPT starts to fall down a bit. It has tried to build two list (one of old versions and one of recent versions) and then remove the versions from the item and then add back the recent and old versions in memory.
This won’t work as it’s not updating the item itself and it’s not possible to set the Versions property on the item like this (instead $itemVersion| Remove-ItemVersion should be used). The logic is also not quite right here for sorting and filtering the versions. If you compare my script linked above there is quite a lot missing and wrong here due to the nuances with Sitecore item versions.

ChatGPT test 4 – Create me a package with a UI

A final test is also a task I’ve implemented recently. The scenario was a bit more complex than this but I thought I’d see how it got on with something similar:

My Score = 2/10

The script created here isn’t great to be honest. It didn’t quite get the properties correct for the Treelist UI. It has created the Package ok but the Add-ItemToPackage method does not exist, it should instead be using New-ItemSource.
Similarly it seems to have made up a function called Save-Package which should instead be Export-Package. Lastly it’s tried to offer me an link to the package to download it, which won’t work as it needs to either be an link to the default packages folder or use the Download-File option instead to present it to the user to download.
Interestingly when I tried to re-word my instructions to see if I could get it to use the Download-File method it actually tried to add items in a different (but still incorrect) way and tried to use the inbuild .NET Framework methods to download the zip to my browser which won’t work in the context of SPE ISE:

Conclusion

So am I worried I’ll be surplus to requirements anytime soon? In short – not currently no. The average of my (not so scientific test) was 5/10.

I think the nuances of a complex platform like Sitecore are hard for an AI powered tool to fully understand to an extent where it can automate code to an good-enough standard currently.

However, I think it could be a great starting point for an SPE script, especially for stubbing out the basics of something. It could also be really useful if Google or SSE fails you and you just can’t find any example code for a task you are working on. It is also very impressive that it can interpret what I’m asking for so well and write some half decent code.

I am not exactly sure how it works, but I’m guessing it’s injesting information from Sitecore Blogs, SSE, Sitecore Documentation Sites and reading the Dlls/Code online, as well as taking learning input from trainers and end-users.

If so then over time it’s going to become better and better and writing code and eventually I might be down the Job Centre wondering what happened.
If it manages to absorb Mark Kassidy’s brain then we will all be in Trouble…

XM Cloud Demystified

I had heard a lot about XM Cloud over the past year or so at SUGCON and from Symposium as well as from the Sitecore Community, however I realised I didn’t really know that much about it still and wasn’t clear on what was included.

Given that XM Cloud was officially released for general availability at Symposium it was about time I learned about if properly and answered some of the questions I had.

So I dived into the XM Cloud documentation and watched a lot of Videos and setup the local XM Cloud instance to learn more about it. I then decided I’d try and speak at the next Sitecore user group in Manchester on XM Cloud to share what I learned. Nothing like a deadline to force you to learn about something properly huh? :-).

You can see the Slides and Video of my presentation ‘XM Cloud Demystified’ below.

Update: You can see an more recent talk I did on XM Cloud at the Columbus Sitecore User Group back in March which is clearer, newer and more in-depth too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yw0kNrh-f4

In my presentation I talk about:

What XM Cloud is
The benefits of XM Cloud
What is included and what is not
How it compares to Sitecore XP
Where it fits in with the new SaaS products Sitecore has acquired and developed
The different development and deployment approaches
Show how XM Cloud looks and Demo my local Instance

What’s Included?

In my research one thing I couldn’t find was a list (or diagram) of everything that is included in XM Cloud. So I put together a list on one of my slides (see my Slides below), however I really wanted to create a diagram of this. I didn’t get chance to before my talk but I’ve now created one which you can see below.
I’m sure it’s not as fancy as Sitecore would have done but it’s pretty clear I think.

Update: after some feedback from Pieter Brinkman on Linked In I’ve updated the diagram a little. Sitecore search is not included, it is instead available as an add-on. XM Cloud Forms Builder is also a Roadmap feature. I’ve also added SPE and Automatic updates to the diagram.

Slides of Presentation

Here are my slides from the SUG (see the Video of my presentation below).

Video of Presentation

Here is the Video of my Talk. Click the video below to jump to my presentation.

Update: You can see an more recent talk I did on XM Cloud at the Columbus Sitecore User Group back in March which is clearer, newer and more in-depth too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yw0kNrh-f4

I leaned a lot from my research and hopefully this is useful for people looking to get an clear over-view of XM Cloud. If you want to know more the developer docs have lots of information.

If there is anything I’ve missed or got wrong then please let me know on Twitter or in the comments so I can correct it as I’m still learning about XM Cloud and things are changing all the time.

While your here check out the rest of the SUG as well as we had some other great talks too.

Fixing Solr Azure App Service Core Locking Issues

We have had intermittent issues with our Sitecore Solr instance in Production which runs in an Azure App Service. Every so often it crashes and we see Core Initialisation errors like so:

sitecore_web_index: org.apache.solr.common.SolrException:org.apache.solr.common.SolrException: Index dir 'D:\home\site\wwwroot\server\solr\sitecore_web_index\data\index/' of core 'sitecore_web_index' is already locked. 
The most likely cause is another Solr server (or another solr core in this server) also configured to use this directory; 
other possible causes may be specific to lockType: native

Doing some research into this it seems that the consensus is that Azure App Services shouldn’t really be used for Solr: https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/23466/solr-cores-locking-v-9-0-2

However I couldn’t actually find any official Sitecore documentation that says that Azure App Services are not supported / recommended for Solr and there are plenty of blog posts out there about setting up Solr for Sitecore in Azure App Services.

We could have switched it to an VM but we’d rather not do that as it’s easier to manage and maintain an Azure App Service than an VM and Microsoft will also handle all the security patches too etc.

So I opened a support ticket with Sitecore to confirm if App Services can be used for Solr and they suggested that I try the following:

1. Make sure the Azure Web App is not scaled out (instance count should be set to 1).
2. Make sure the environment variable WEBSITE_DISABLE_OVERLAPPED_RECYCLING is set to 1

We already have our App Service scaled to just one instance but when checking the configuration settings we didn’t have the WEBSITE_DISABLE_OVERLAPPED_RECYCLING setting set.
So we added this config and set the value to 1:

Setting this to 1 stops new instances of the app being started before the current instance is shut down – which can cause locking.

Since making this change we’ve not had any issues with it intermittently locking.

Update: I still had issues with cores locking occasionally and started on a solution for it using PowerShell in a Runbook a while ago and I have now completed this and shared it here: https://www.flux-digital.com/blog/auto-re-starting-solr-indexes-get-locked-azure-app-service/

Hope this helps someone else who’s having this issue too.

Creating Preview / Draft Sites in SXA using SPE

A few weeks ago I was tasked with providing the ability for content editors to be able to have a preview (or draft) site for SXA sites when using the CM Url. The requirement was to be able to view ‘Draft’ content/versions of pages (without publishing them) for stakeholders to be able to preview them before they are published to the CD instance.

In an Traditional Sitecore setup this is pretty easy, you would just edit the site definition config in the Sitecore config with a patch file to change the database used to Master when on the CM.
For SXA this is a bit trickier as the Site definitions are dynamically built by SXAs site manager when Sitecore starts up (or the SXA Site Manager is ran again in Sitecore).

However after reading around it seems it was possible to achieve what I needed to do. I had to duplicate the existing Site Grouping definition item and change the database that it uses to Master. See an example below:

I also changed the environment to ‘Draft’ and added the following Patch file on the CM only, this tells the CM that the current environment is ‘Draft’ and to use Site Definition items with that environment setting:

 <sitecore>
    <settings>
       <!-- Environment name used by cm-->
       <setting name="XA.Foundation.Multisite.Environment" value="Draft" />
    </settings>
 </sitecore>

The last thing I did is change the name of the Site Grouping definition item and the title to include the word ‘Draft’. This was to make it clearer to content editors and stakeholders that they are editing/viewing ‘Draft’ content.

This results in each SXA site having two site Site Grouping definition items; the original (pointed at the Web DB) which the CD instance will use and the new Preview/Draft site that the CM instance uses:

Automating Creating of Draft Sites with SPE

As I needed to create Draft sites for quite a few sites I wrote an SPE script to do this for me:

Deleting Draft Sites

Should you need to remove your draft Sites (e.g during local testing) then I wrote a script for that too:

Site Ordering

One thing I discovered is that the order of the Sites in the SXA site manager matters. SXA will return the first one it matches based on Environment and the order defined here:
/sitecore/system/Settings/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Multisite/Management/Sites

You therefore need to ensure the Draft site is above the original site grouping in the list. You can re-order these in the SXA Site manager using the up and down arrows but I had some issues with this not taking affect so instead I moved the draft sites up the list in the field they are stored in instead. As I had a lot of sites to do this for I actually ended up writing an SPE script to move all the draft sites to the top of the list:

Right-Click ‘Create Draft Site’

The above scripts were really useful to get the draft sites setup for the existing sites but I also needed a way to quickly add draft sites for new SXA sites in future. I decided an nice way or doing that would be using an SPE context menu script.

Here is the script, make sure you place it here: e.g: /sitecore/system/Modules/PowerShell/Script Library/{YOUR SCRIPT LIBRARY}/Content Editor/Context Menu:

Get CM Url Function:

Move Draft Site Function:

Experience Editor Notification

Again in order to make it clearer to content editors and stakeholders that they are editing/viewing ‘Draft’ content I decided an Experience Editor Notification would be useful. So again I turned to SPE to do this. I’m not sure if that many people know you can do this with SPE but it’s a really simple way to it with no C# code or config required:

Note that if you are using SPE 5 on Sitecore 9.02 or 9.01 then you will likely find there is a bug in the SPE config and you need to patch it like so to move the getPageEditorNotifications to the correct section of the config:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
 <sitecore>
 <pipelines>
 <group name="ExperienceEditor" groupName="ExperienceEditor">
 <pipelines>
 <!--patch to add SPE 5.0 PageEditorNotifications in correct config group-->
 <getPageEditorNotifications>
 <processor type="Cognifide.PowerShell.VersionSpecific.Integrations.Pipelines.PageEditorNotificationScript, Cognifide.PowerShell.VersionSpecific"/>
 </getPageEditorNotifications>
 </pipelines>
 </group>
 </pipelines>
 </sitecore>
</configuration>

The end result of this work is that I now had Draft site functionality setup for all required sites, quick ways to add new draft sites as needed and it is clear to content editors that the draft site content is in use on the CM.

Dedicated Preview Instance considerations

Obviously for some scenarios you might have wanted to have a dedicated Preview/Draft instance with an specific url such as www.preview-mysite.com and publish to an ‘Preview’ database publication target. The config for the environment and hostname would then be used here instead. However for our purposes using the CM url is fine as the access is restricted and cuts down on costs of an additional instance in Azure.

Useful Links

As usual there were some really useful blog posts which helped point me in the right direction with this and figure out what I needed to do:

https://ggullentops.blogspot.com/2019/04/publishing-target-in-sitecore-sxa.html

https://getfishtank.ca/blog/setting-up-multiple-hosts-sitecore-sxa-site

https://blog.senktas.net/2019/10/20/sitecore-powershell-extensions-integration-with-experience-editor/

Hopefully others will find this information and the scripts I’ve written for setting up Preview sites in SXA useful in future.

p.s – if you wondering why the Harry Potter image; well apparently it took J. K. Rowling 13 attempts to finally get someone to publish the Philosopher’s Stone so it nearly remained in Draft and never published!

SUGCON 2022 Thoughts and Takeaways

It’s been 3 years Since the last ‘In-Person’ SUGCON in London 2019, so I was really looking forward to going to Budapest to learn some new Sitecore things and catch up with Sitecore Developers and friends from across the world. I’ve been to Budapest for a weekend once before and It’s a beautiful city.

After a long flight with a change at Amsterdam I arrived at the Conference centre in Budapest pretty late but immediately bumped into a bunch of people I know from the Sitecore Community. After a drink in the bar it was time to hit the sack ready for the first day of SUGCON.

Day 1.

Steve Tzikakis – Opening Keynote

There was a notable excitement in the room as Tamas opened up SUGCON to much applause welcomed everyone and introduced Steve Tzikakis to the stage.

Steve seemed genuinely happy to be at SUGCON and have the opportunity to talk to the Sitecore Developer Community. He hit us with some Stats about the platform. Apparently there are 2,200 Sitecorians and the last two years have bought about the biggest changes in Sitecore’s 21 year history.

Things have accelerated forwards in Digital during the pandemic and Sitecore has taken advantage of this by investing huge amounts of Money on the platform and employees. The have doubled their spend on R&D and doubled the number of employees across the organisation, 60% of staff have only been at Sitecore a year or less!. Innovation is key for Sitecore to gain an competitive edge and to claim the number 1 spot so they have spent 22% of their revenue on R&D.

Steve shared an impressive Side of well known brands that now user Sitecore and talked about how Sitecore want to grow the platform to 3,000 customers but without increasing their service offering. Instead they want to do this by enabling partners to deliver better and more quickly on a Modern Mar-tech stack that has flexible, headless Commerce, CDP and Content integrated together with the best interface for the task at hand, this all sounds good to me.

Anyone that has not been living in a Jam Jar for the past two years will have noticed that Sitecore spent a whole lot of money procuring a number of platforms over the last 24 months or so. These are: Content Hub (Stylelabs), Boxever, MooSend, Four41 and Reflektion.

These products all bring a number of functions to Sitecore that it is currently missing, whilst also having some overlap with what XP already offers. So I was interested to see what’s happened with these acquisitions and what the plans are for them going forwards. Next up was Dave ‘O Flanagan to talk more in-depth about some of this.

Dave ‘O Flanagan – Re-Imagining the DXP

Dave opened by explaining how his Son caught COVID over lock-down and went from an average FIFA player to an Expert after isolating in his room with his PlayStation for 10 days and playing it non stop. This demonstrates that things have accelerated extremely fast during the pandemic and Sitecore has had to adapt to this change quickly.

Dave discussed how Sitecore are invested in cloud first and that they have shifted their position to not try and sell customers the whole Sitecore stack but just the parts they really need by focusing on speed, flexibility, relevance and agility.

The following slide regarding where Sitecore is today was interesting:

And here is the future Roadmap for Sitecore for 2022:
One element of this is the XM Cloud offering, this will be a headless architecture which is cloud-ready, with site layout and page management, analytics, personalisation and testing, executed at the edge.

Next, Content Hub Headless was introduced, this looks really interesting. Essentially an light-weight headless CMS built on top of Content Hub.

Dave then handed over to Andy Cohen to show us more about XM Cloud.

Andy Cohen – XM Cloud

Andy opened up by Telling us what XM Cloud is:

And also what is isn’t:

Next Andy introduced XM Cloud deploy and attempted an live deployment.

Andy had a few technical issues (as is often the way with complex live demos) but he managed to deploy Sitecore using Cloud deploy in Just over 5 minutes! That’s pretty impressive from an empty environment in the cloud.

Akshay Sura & Kamruz Jaman- What it means to be a Sitecore Architect in the Composable DXP world

Next up for me was fellow Sitecore MVP’s Akshay and Kamrus sharing all the knowledge they have learned on working with Composable DXPs.

These guys have spent a lot of time working with Composable DXPs with Sitecore and other vendors over the past few years and they really have a lot of useful knowledge to share.

One of the key messages was that a different approach is required with Composable.

A lot of Solutions already involve a many integrations, however they are likely not as decoupled as they should be.

A key thing that was mentioned it is not a one-size fits all approach and there are advantages as well as disadvantages.

Here is an overview of a typical Composable DXP Solution.

The approach should be based around the architecture and business strategy and not just the technical solution.

It was also interesting to see the different in development cycle for Typical Sitecover Development vs Composable.

As you can see the phases can be overlapped much more to allow Sites to be delivered much faster and therefore new features to be built sooner.

One thing to get your head around is that a lot of Composable systems don’t have visual editor for the web or any channel so this is one of the trade-offs and things to adjust to.

The session finished with some slides that helped answer some questions that most .Net developers must have asked themselves in the past few years. It’s good to see we are not redundant :-).

This session was very useful for anyone who has not stepped into the Composable world yet, I really appreciated the honestly too.

Thomas Desmond – Flexible Static: Static Site Personalization at the Edge

This session looked interesting and after the previous talk I thought it would be good to learn more about what can be done with Edge Functions and the like.

One of the trade-offs of Static Sites is obviously the loss of Personalisation due to it.. err ..being static. Rehydration allows for personalisation to be done on the edge.

Some examples of data available at the edge:

Sitecore Personalize can be used to get user data and display a personalised version of the page to the user.

The middleware functions do this look pretty powerful. I’m going to add this to my list of things to experiment with over the next few months.

Martin Miles – The mastery of Sitecore Upgrades

I know Martin from the Sitecore Community and when I heard he was doing a talk on upgrades I knew it would be one I’d be attending. Upgrades might not be the most exciting of subjects but if you’ve done a few Sitecore Upgrade like me your always looking for any tips and tools for your arsenal to make them easier.

Martin shared a ton of really useful information in his talk. I’m going to pick out some of the key ones only here as there are far too many useful ones to share and Martin Blogged about it the other day and shared his full slides.

Two different approaches to upgrades:

Stages of an upgrade and estimating it:

The need for being able to roll back attempted upgrade steps bit by bit:

Tip 1:

Tip 2:

This was one of the most time consuming issues I had with my last Sitecore upgrade :-(.

Those DLLs that have been removed changed will need re-writing/updating:

I blogged about Items as resources at the end of last year but if you upgrade to 10.1 or newer then the upgrade is simplified as the default Sitecore databases are empty now.

End Of Day 1

And with that Day One at the conference came to an end. It was time for Dinner, the Awards ceremony, Quiz and Drinks.

Later I went into Budapest with some friends from the Sitecore community to explore and have a few drinks. If you’ve not been to Budapest before the Ruin Bars were pretty cool.

Scooters back from the pub were kind of entertaining.

Day 2

After breakfast I headed down to the first session of the day that I wanted to catch.

Himadri Chakrabarti – Frontend First Architecture for Headless CMS

Himadri’s session was an interesting lightning talk on how to create a decoupled architecture using front-end.

I’d not really thought about IOC from the perspective of front-end so it was cool to see how this works with Next.js and typescript and how TSyringe can be used to integrate with a Headless CMS and switch between them.

Useful links from this session:

Ronald van der Plas – Content Hub Scripting as a Professional

My next Lightning talk was on Content Hub Scripting. I’ve not really done much with Content hub yet so I was interested in finding out more.

We were shown how the built-in C# scripting capability works and it’s limitations but also how to work-around these with the CLI.

The Content Hub CLI support a number of operations and can be run from the command line.

Core Commands

Environment Setup. This allows developers to sync scripts between Content Hub and their local machine and to run unit tests too.

Corey Smith – Stop Worrying and Love the HttpClient

The last lightning Talk was by fellow MVP Corey. He’d hit this issue with the HttpClient causing issues with socket exceptions on nearly every client project he’s worked on and wanted to share his learnings.

If you’ve ever done this on a Sitecore 8.2 – 9u2 project then your basically doing it wrong:

This is how you should be doing it. The important bit is the Connection Lease Timeout.

This is how you would use the Client Accessor:

For Site 9.1 and beyond there is a slightly different approach which you should use.

Rodrigo Peplau – CDP & Personalize for Sitecore XP fanatics

After lunch I decided to go to Rodrigo’s session on CDP & Personalize as I’ve read a lot about Boxever / Sitecore CDP but I’ve not used it yet.

Rodrigo did a great job of drawing comparisons with Site XP during his talk, calling out similar features we are comfortable with.

Concepts such as Personalisation and MV Testing and their counterpart in CDP were explained with examples.

An overview of how to integrate with CDP and Personalise was given.

The Boxever JavaScript looked pretty straight forward to integrate and powerful too.

Sending events to Sitecore CDP using the JavaScript works as follows:

Contacts are Guests in CDP

Decision Models are used to create business logic in the CDP

This was a nice comparison of Variants in CDP vs Variations in XP

Audiences can be targeted with Personalize in a number of different ways

All in all this was a really insightful session and helped me better understand how CDP works and what you can do with it.

Marc Ramer – Sitecore Discover – real-time intelligence for product search and merchandising

After a break I attended a session on Sitecore’s Search Platform acquisition (Reflektion). I’ve heard very little about this since it was purchased so was intrigued to learn more.

We saw a live demo of Sitecore Discover in action on a website selling products.

We were then shown the API details

The Customer Engagement Console also seems to have a lot of powerful options

Here are some analytics showing in the Console.

There are also a lot of Implementation options to pick from.

We were also given some info on the Discover SDK

Jake Hookom and Roger Connolly – Detailed Product Roadmap – Closing keynote

It was now time for the final session where we found out what was on the Roadmap for Sitecore from Jake and Roger.

There was a lot of cool information (and surprises) in this session so I’ll share some of the key slides on XM Cloud, Sitecore Pages, Sitecore Components, Composable from any datasource!, Webhooks and the main Roadmap too.

Sitecore Manager Looks interesting

Sitecore pages will be in XM Cloud and looks impressive.

XM Cloud Personalisation

Personalisation on the Edge in XM Cloud

Sitecore Components in XM Cloud

This slide was a Game changer, Sitecore allowing data sources from Competitor CMS platforms such as Contentful and Kentico. Who’d have though this would every happen a few years ago.

Awesome Roadmap around APIs

Event Webhooks allow extensibility in an Composable world.

Here is the detailed 2022 Roadmap (Borrowed from Twitter as my photo has poor contrast):

Closing

And with that the first In-Person SUGCON in 3 years was over and it was time to head to the airport for my flight home.
It was a very enjoyable SUGCON where I learn a lot and got to catch-up with a lot of friends and people I know in the Sitecore Community. Well done to all the organisers on putting together such a awesome event and to all the speakers for the great talks. There is certainly a lot to digest and mull over here, but the future looks bright and (dare I say) exciting for Sitecore developers in 2022.

Sitecore Sloth Module 1.1 Released

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I updated Sloth to support Items as Resource files. I’ve now got round to releasing this package on Nuget and creating Sitecore Packages for this too in case you want to install in that way instead. I’ve updated the Github readme with all the info too.

Sloth 1.1 supports being able to enable and disable the module under the settings here: /sitecore/system/Modules/Sitecore Sloth. Please ensure you enable the module and save the item after installing version 1.1.

sloth-enabled

Installing Sloth 1.1 for Sitecore 10.1+ Via Nuget

You can install version 1.1 of Sloth via Nuget like so if using Sitecore 10.1 or above:

Install-Package FluxDigital.Foundation.Sloth -Version 1.1.0

I’ve tested installing the Nuget package for Sitecore 1.1 and if installed correctly you should see the following files:

sloth-1.1-nuget-install

sloth-1.1-nuget-install-2

I haven’t created a Sloth 1.1 Nuget package for Sitecore 8-10 yet but I will do so when I get a minute.

Hope this helps and your enjoying using Sloth.

Please let me know of any issues you have and I’ll try and resolve them ASAP.

Have a great Christmas everyone.

Sitecore Sloth Module

A while back Kamruz Jaman wrote about how to stop experience editor reloading the page when you make changes to components.

Over the years I’ve added this improvement into a few Sites I’ve worked on in an upgrade-proof way and tweaked it a bit. It prevents the page scrolling back to the top when reloading when adding or editing components, changing datasources, rendering params or workflow.

This still seems to be a frustration even in the latest version of Sitecore and as adding this improvement in involves a bit of code (and understanding of how to inject scripts into Sitecore Experience Editor) I decided it would be nice to package this up into a proper Sitecore module.

Example of Experience Editor Issue

You can see an example of this below with a simple Bootstrap 5 Site. When a Card components properties are edited in experience editor it scrolls the editor half way up the page when saving.

Sloth Demo

When performing the same tasks in as in the previous video (editing component properties & adding datasources) you can see that Experience Editor takes you back to where you were after saving.

So here it is ‘Sitecore Sloth’. Named so, as Sloths are pretty stationary animals and that’s what this module does, stops Experience Editor moving around too much :-).

You can download the Sitecore package and install it from Github and I’m going to push it to NuGet soon too. The install instructions are in the readme here.

You can also see the code on Github here. It’s been created as an Foundation Module following Helix conventions.

Sitecore Sloth has been tested with most versions of Sitecore from 9.1 up to 9.3. Sitecore 10 update 2 seems to have resolved this issue, I’m not sure about other 10.x versions.

Please note it will only work on MVC based Sitecore sites and not Webforms ones as it hooks into the MVC rendering pipeline.

Thanks to Kamruz for sharing the original code and idea and hope it’s useful for others too.

Scripting Sitecore Packages with SPE

This week I needed to automate the creation of a package to include a number of items that we want to backup before syncing content down from other environments. I needed to conditionally only backup certain test pages and components based on name.

I figured I’d be able to do this with Sitecore PowerShell Extensions and it turns out you can.

Here is a script based on the one included in SPE (/sitecore/system/Modules/PowerShell/Script Library/SPE/Core/Platform/Development/PowerShell Extensions Maintenance/Prepare Console Distribution).

The script creates a package with two sources:

Test Pages – pages within a specific folder
Test Components – matches components in sub-folders that have a specific name (sub-folders that start with ‘Test’)

It then provides the package for you to download like so:

To use this script update the meta data section at the top and the paths to include your own pages and components. Check the –InstallMode param is correct for what you want to do and also the filters for component name matches what you need, update it if not. You could include additional sources too by duplicating the $source = ‘x’ and $package.Sources.Add($source); lines.

Hopefully this is useful for others that need to do this in future.