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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 :-).

New UK Sitecore User Group Website

TLDR

If you are looking for Manchester Sitecore User Group or London Sitecore User Group events please visit: https://scug.co.uk/

Why we are no longer using Meetup.com

Meetup recently announced a change to their pricing policy for organising meetups and now want to charge each attendee $2 to RSVP for an event.

Given that it’s unlikely that everyone will want to pay this to RSVP to SUGs a New UK Sitecore User Group Website has been created by Steve McGill and Johannes Zijlstra. We are no longer using Meetup.com anymore to advertising UK SUGs.

The Manchester, London, Bristol and Cardiff Sitecore User Groups will all be using https://scug.co.uk/ to advertise SUGs going forwards.

You can register for an event by clicking the Login link at the top of the page and login with either: Google, Facebook, GitHub, Microsoft, Twitter or LinkedIn.

You can do so safely, we will not share your email address with anyone, including sponsors.

As the Site is fairly new I thought I’d write this post to try and raise awareness of it and encourage people to Signup for the upcoming London and Manchester Sitecore User Group events.

Upcoming Sitecore User Groups

The following is a list of up-coming UK Sitecore User Groups:

> London Sitecore User Group

26th February 2020 @Avanade, 30 Cannon Street

https://scug.co.uk/events/2020/02/london-avanade-sitecore-usergroup/

> Manchester Sitecore User Group

11th of March 2020 @Valtech’s Offices, Basil Chambers, 65 High Street, M4 1FS

https://scug.co.uk/events/2020/03/manchester-sitecore-usergroup/

Hopefully this is useful for those not aware of this change and we’l see you at one of the UK SUGs soon.

Thanks to Steve and Johannes for their time to building and updating the Site too!. I’m trying to help with some new features and if you fancy helping out too then. I’m sure they would be happy for your to input.

My Sitecore MVP 2018 Journey So Far

Back in late January I was fortunate enough to be awarded Sitecore Technology MVP 2018. For anyone in the Sitecore Community this is a great privilege as there are only 208 Technology MVP’s worldwide and 20 in the UK.

Sitecore_MVP_logo_Technology_2018

I hadn’t got round to writing on my Blog about it at the time so I thought it would be good to talk about my experience so far this year as an MVP and also what my plans are for this year.

Every year, the Sitecore MVP Awards honour individuals with a passion for sharing their knowledge and expertise through active participation in online and offline Sitecore communities.

Sitecore has an fantastic community of developers who really try and help one another out both online and offline and share their knowledge and expertise whenever they can.

If you want to see the full list of Sitecore MVPs for 2018 you can see it here: https://mvp.sitecore.net/MVPs/2018

As an MVP there are a number of benefits; such as getting to give feedback to Sitecore on things they are working on, access to additional resources and Community Groups and gaining early knowledge of future releases & features coming out of Sitecore HQ.

How Do I Become an MVP?

I’ve seen this asked a few times on Twitter, Slack and Stack Exchange etc and I think the consensus is that you shouldn’t aim to become an Sitecore MVP but should instead try and get involved in the Sitecore Community as much as possible.

Share what you learn on a Blog, get involved in Sitecore Stack Exchange (SSE) by posting both questions and answers, join in on Sitecore Slack anad get involved in your local Sitecore User Group. Maybe do a presentation or two and share your learnings and expertise.

This is a great post on SSE from Mark Cassidy with more ideas of how you can get involved in the Sitecore Community: https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/1689/how-can-i-connect-with-the-sitecore-community.

By getting involved in the Community like this if you feel you’ve contributed enough you can nominate yourself (usually in November) and ask others to recommend you too.

You can read more about the MVP program here: https://mvp.sitecore.net/become-an-mvp

There is also an excellent SSE post here about becoming an MVP by Tamas Varga (who is an Technical Evangelist at Sitecore and works on the MVP Team): https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/5796/how-to-become-a-sitecore-mvp

My Plans For 2018 as an MVP

Since becoming an MVP I’ve tried to continue being active in the Community and have written some useful blog posts on Installing Sitecore 9 Update 1 and Getting Started with JSS.

Part 2 of working with Sitecore JSS is coming up soon and I’ll be giving a talk on this at the next Manchester meetup along with 2 talks from other Sitecore MVPs:

The Sitecore Sessions

London, GB
226 Members

The Sitecore Sessions are a group of events, up and down the country, with an aim of catering for what we hear the community want to know more about.We have been, and contin…

Check out this Meetup Group →

I’m planning on giving an overview of installing JSS. I’ll then be going into more detail on and getting up and running and building components. Hopefully this will be one of a number of presentations I’ll get to do this year.

I’m also hoping to build my first Sitecore Module and share it on the Marketplace this year. I’ve got a few interesting ideas so watch this space.

I’m really looking forward to learning more about Sitecore 9 and catching up with the Sitecore Community & other Sitecore MVPs at SUGCON in Berlin next month and the MVP Summit at Symposium later this year.

Lastly I wanted to say thanks to Sitecore and the great Community for recognising my contributions and particularly the MVPs and Sitecore staff that recommended me (you know who you are :-)).

My thoughts on SUGCON 2016 – Day 2

badge There was an early start for Day 2 (especially after a late-ish night involving a few strong Danish Beers), but I knew there were some intriguing talks today so didn’t want to miss anything.

You can read about Day 1 here if you missed it.

The first session that caught my interest was Nick Wesselmans talk on how Active Commerce use SIM, Powershell, Octopus Deploy and Azure to automate product builds.

Using SIM, Powershell, Octopus Deploy and Azure to automate product builds.

Nick gave an overview of how they created a PowerShell wrapper for SIM to automate Sitecore instances for product builds for their Active Commerce product.

He also talked about how they use Sitecore Power Shell Extensions (SPE) to do things like automate publishing, rebuild the links database and initialise Sitecore Zip package builds. I’ve experimented with SPE but I’ve not used it in anger and this has given me ideas for how I might use it more on current or future projects.

Finally, he talked about their use of Octopus for deployment of packages and invoking PowerShell scripts and Azure IaaS and Azure Blob Storage and AzCopy which is used for quickly spinning up VMs for hosting the product build and test environments. I liked the idea of these being scripted to only run during business hours.

The Active Commerce team also use Bamboo for their build server (but are thinking of moving to Team City). Nick showed us that their build pipeline looks like this:

It was nice to see some familiar approaches here, albeit with different tools in some instances and some new ideas too.

You Me and Sitecore MVC

After a short break Kern Herskind delivered and entertaining (and Circus themed) presentation on Sitecore MVC. He even rode a unicycle at the end!

Kern gave a general overview on MVC for those not familiar with the concepts and then how Sitecore MVC works and whats available out of the box. Not much of this was new to me but it was good get a refresher anyway.

Then Kern talked through some of the downfalls of Sitecore MVC and how he has gone about solving them. Things like renderings not being able to alter any HTML that is rendered prior to them being rendered and multiple form posting issues.

We then go a sneaky peak of what coming up for Sitecore MVC, such as abstract base classes and better ServiceLocator and DI support:

Kern finished by talking about the future of Sitecore MVC and expectations for the future.

Good to see better documentation and closing feature gaps on the list of improvements.

The key message here being that Sitecore MVC is going to continue to be the preferred UI Framework.

Hedgehog then did a quick talk on their TDS product and helped to answer the question a lot of developers might have, “why should I pay for TDS instead of using Unicorn”. The answer is probably in these two slides, maybe go and show them to your Boss :-).

Essentially it does a lot more besides just syncing items between sitecore instances:

I haven’t used it but I’ve head good things about it from other Sitecore Developers.

After lunch (which was excellent by the way) I opted to attend two talks on Sitecore Habitat. One by Ruud Van Falier called Introducing Sitecore Habitat and the 2^nd by Anders Laub on Practical Habitat: Embrace the Architecture.

Introducing Sitecore Habitat

For those who don’t know what Habit is, it is an Architecture approach for Sitecore development and is designed to give best practice guidance on how to structure your Sitecore projects. I have taken a look at it a few times but not really used it and the feedback from other Sitecore developers I’d spoken to was that it was quite complicated, so I was interested in finding out more about it.

Ruud was presenting to a packed room with quite a few developers stood up at the back, obviously as keen as me to know more. He started with the basic concepts of Habitat, explaining how all modules are self-contained and that there should be no communication that goes upwards between modules.

He also explained the the 3 layers of Habitat: Foundation, Features, Projects.

Ruud then discussed examples of elements that might live in these layers and how the dependencies flows downwards.

He then showed the technology stack, which are probably familiar tools to most of you. Sitecore 8.2, MVC, Dynamic Placeholders, Unicorn, Bootstrap, JQuery, Sass and Gulp.

A run-through of the Habitat solution structure then followed and an explanation of the different build tasks used.

There was then a more in-depth explanation regarding Modules:

And then more detail on layers:

Finally, a pros and cons slide and questions:

Ruud was honest about the fact that Habitat is in the early stages and is changing every day, he also said it’s not meant to be taken as a ‘Boiler Plate’ for Sitecore solutions – more a guideline. However, I left the session will a lot of things to investigate further and will definitely be taking a closer look at Habitat and how some of It’s concepts can be applied to the projects I am working on.

Practical Habitat: Embrace the Architecture

With my appetite now whetted for Habitat I went straight to the next session on embracing the architecture.

Anders talk started with a general discussion around Architecture and then moved to Habitat and why Pentia use it as an architecture for their solution:

He then dived into a demo of their solution and explained how it differs to the default Habitat setup. I have a video of this somewhere which I’ll try and add here when I get a minute.

He then discussed a few foundation modules they have created and how it really works well for them as an approach.

Anders took some tough questions from the crowd well (such as the number of projects in Habitat – which is many) and I think by the end of the session most of the room will be taking another look at Habitat.

Ladies and gentlemen start your testing.

Testing in Sitecore can be notoriously difficult and for some Sitecore developers this means that unit and integration tests that involve the Sitecore context or items are sometimes skipped. I was interested to see if Alastair had some other ways to implement testing and I wasn’t disappointed :-).

Alastair Deneys ran us through 4 ways in which to Unit test with Sitecore. The first was an interesting one and was to essentially install Sitecore in your application and then run the tests from an asp.net web page test runner.

The 2nd and 3rd were to add a minimal or full Sitecore config files and the Sitecore dlls you need to your nunit test project and run It. This worked pretty well but as Alastair said, isn’t proper unit testing as it’s using real data.

The 4th was to use FakeDb to mock the Sitecore items you need to run your tests. I’d heard about FakeDb before but not used it so it was nice to see an example of how this is done.

Alastair also showed us how Sitecore.LiveTesting can be used to spin up an instance of Sitecore in a container in the background to test against.

It was a bit slow but seemed really cool and definitely something I’m going to experiment with.

The key message here was, whatever you do make sure you create tests and don’t get hung up on if they are real unit tests or actually integration tests.

Sadly it was now time to head to get our flight home so I missed out on the last talk of the day by Martina Welander on refactoring doc.sitecore.net, hopefully I can find it on Google Hangout.

SUGCON was a great experience and It has given me a whole lot of ideas and things to look into for current and future Sitecore projects. Thanks to the Sitecore Community and the sponsors for putting on the event.

My only regret is not having chance to chat to any of the MVPs who have been so helpful on Slack and on their blogs, but I’ll definitely be back next year so I’ll buy you a beer or two then instead.

Till next time.

My thoughts on SUGCON 2016 – Day 1

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.

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):

8.3

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).

sync

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.

design patterns

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.