Recently a tweet by Kiran Patil caught my attention and made me think that I needed to provide a bit more context to the issue he (and perhaps others) might run into. https://twitter.com/kiranpatils/status/1280315487625281547 So what is the actual issue? When you install the SXA Styleguide you get a website build in SXA that explains how SXA works. It includes example usage of all the components and much more. One of the things it adds is…
With the installation of SXA you get access to several standard SXA components that you can use to build your webpages. Those components are designed to fit the most common requirements but will never meet all requirements. Instead of providing even more components, the standard components have been made extremely flexible. This gives you the opportunity to makes changes to those standard components to meet your specific requirements. But where do you make these changes?…
For some time now you can use NuGet to manage Sitecore dependencies in your Visual Studio projects. But did you know that we now offer assembly list packages as well? These packages provide you with a list of default Sitecore assemblies being used by various versions. Using these packages you can validate or exclude the Sitecore-provided assemblies from your solution builds. At this moment we have assembly packages available for the following Sitecore roles/deployment targets:…
Whenever I want to test something, do some R&D or just need an example SXA implementation to record a video or explain a certain concept I had two choices: Use a blank SXA instance or use Habitat Home, our official Sitecore Demo environment. Both of them work excellent, but a blank SXA instance is typically not sufficient due to the lack of content. The other option, using Habitat Home was often the opposite since it…
With the introduction of SXA 9.3 we are introducing the SXA CLI. The CLI (Command Line Interface) is a command line tool that allows you to setup a theme locally and register it with SXA. Before we start installing the CLI locally you need to make sure you have NodeJS installed on your local machine. We are using NPM (Node Package Manager) to install the CLI and all its dependencies. The other dependency is that…
With the SXA 9.3 two new search features have been introduced. First, we have the aggregated search filter. This component allows you to create dynamic filters sets, which will automatically adapt to the content available in the search results. Then we have the facet summary, which shows the facets applied and allows you to remove them individually or all at once.
One of the biggest focus areas of the SXA 9.3 release is making SXA more appealing and easier for frontend developers to work with. As a major effort in that, the whole frontend developer workflow is now improved based on feedback we received. What has changed? Everyone who develops with SXA has seen the way themes are implement. A single theme is stored inside the media library alongside with all of it’s files. Meaning that…
One of the features of SXA 9.3 that I am most excited about is the introduction of Scriban. Scriban is the new templating language within SXA 9.3. So why a new templating language? One of the changes that Sitecore 9.3 is introducing is the removal of the current templating engine; NVelocity. The SXA development team needed an altnative and did their research in which they evaluated different templating engines. They concluded that Scriban is one…
Two weeks ago the Sitecore Symposium 2019 in Orlando kicked of with the pre-conference seminars on Monday. The following three days were full of inspiring and entertaining sessions combined with some more social activities. Once again I had the pleasure to present this symposium together with good friend and co-worker Adam Najmanowicz. As you might of guessed we presented on the most important (upcoming) changes in SXA 9.3 (yes 9.3 instead of 1.10. Version alignment…
One of the hidden secrets of SXA is called Content Tokens. Content Tokens are essentially content items that have a key and a value and can be referenced in fields on other items.
