SUGCON 2025 - the part with XM Cloud Content

SUGCON 2025 - XM Cloud Content

Save the best for last...  that does not only count for this blog post series, but also for Sugcon 2025 itself. Before we continue, as this is part three I also have a part one and a part two 🙂

XM Cloud Content

Alistair Deneys had the honor of presenting us XM Cloud Content. 

Let's start with "what is XM Cloud Content?".  Seems a very simple question but to be honest since the conference I have seen a few answers to this question. After the presentation one would have said this is a new CMS. But apparently some people who had heard about something like this before, seem to think it's not a new product but the base for a brand new version of XM Cloud. 

The session description on the Sugcon website tells me this:

XM Cloud Content is going to be an evolution of Content Hub ONE, Sitecore's fully managed headless CMS. Come and have a peek at this new product which is currently under development at Sitecore.

So for me at the moment we are looking at a new CMS. Which would be great as it has become very clear that XM Cloud as it is now is not suited for everyone and Content Hub One is dead. A new product to fill that gap would be tremendous news so let's just assume that is really what we saw here. 

XM Cloud Content should become the result of all the knowledge Sitecore captured over the past years about creating a CMS - the good things but certainly also the bad ones. Learn from your mistakes is a good credo, and we did see some of that already in the first basics of the newborn. 

Foundation

For SAAS products we shouldn't care what is behind the wall. If it works well it's ok. And although this architecture diagram probably doesn't mean much - it did help making a point about something that has been bothering Sitecore users for a long time. I'm talking about publishing - which will still be possible here but there will be no database transfers anymore making it a lot easier to make this finally fast. 

Probably a bit more interesting already is the domain model. 

• Items will be defined by content types
• Taxonomies will be used to classify items
• Fragments can be used for re-usable content type parts, but as they can also be used in searches (and maybe security?) they become a vital part in composing a good content type structure

Seems all pretty simple and very similar to other equivalent products.

Queries

Queries are done with GraphQL and it seems we will get many options. One that was interesting is querying on fragments as that might avoid having lists of content types in your query. 

Note that the GraphQL schema is definitely not final yet (as is all the rest) and Alistair is looking for feedback on this part. 

There would also be a way to save GraphQL queries - a bit like stored procedures in a sql database. For complex queries this could save a bunch when sending the requests.

Demo 

The main part of the presentation was actually a demo - which is nice as this means something already exists and this is not just a theoretical exercise.

We did get a glimpse of a UI - which was completely in the line of what all the Sitecore products should look like these days. Clean, white, simple. But the demo was completely done with the CLI actually. 

If you can prepare scripts and json files this all goes a bit smoother of course. We saw Alistair creating the content types and taxonomy, then creating some actual content to test with and finally querying that content in several ways. 

The demo went pretty well to be honest - one would wonder what he sacrificed to the demo gods 😈 

We were also introduced to the security aspects. Those looked pretty nice - and you might think this is pretty common but there are some CMS systems out there were this is not so trivial. 

Anyway, it will be possible to restrict access via tokens based on several aspects going from the publish state and an environment to types or fragments and apparently even on saved queries.

Conclusion 

I can only say I am really looking forward to this XM Content Cloud. It looks very promising. Hopefully Sitecore can really deliver this time and can put some pricing on it that is also suitable for smaller markets.

To be continued...  maybe on Symposium?

SUGCON 2025 - part two with XM Cloud

SUGCON 2025 - the story continues with XM Cloud

Make sure to read part 1 of the Sugcon 2025 saga...

Vercel

Let's start this second part with something maybe not completely Sitecore related but very relevant to most current projects so I was glad to see Vercel present at the conference. Not only to have a nice chat with them at the booth, trying to get answers about their version and support strategy. To be honest, that is not yet clear to me but they also gave a session about optimizing Next.js - which was even for someone like me who is completely not (yet) into that Next stuff pretty interesting. 

Alex Hawley presented in a clear and very comprehensible way a few pitfalls and how to solve them. Very interesting for headless implementation of Sitecore (or even other platforms).

JSS - XM Cloud

This brings us to the next topic - proudly presented by Christian Hahn and Liz Nelson. The JSS SDK and starterkits have had a major cleanup.  Note that we are talking about the XMCloud version here. By decoupling this from the XP version a lot of became possible.

In general: they removed a lot of code, making the packages a lot smaller and faster to load.  All developers will know that this is a very pleasant step to take. It brings a fresh start and there seems to be indeed more things on the roadmap to keep on improving. 

 

It's nice to see some of the recommendations from the Vercel session coming back here in the new and improved jss, or should we say Content SDK now... 

As we are talking about XM Cloud, we cannot not mention Andy Cohen. His session was not really what I expected, but it was an eye-opener - as was his first implementation experience apparently 😐

XM Cloud - Marketplace

We are staying in the XM Cloud sphere with the session by Krassi Eneva and Justin Vogt about the marketplace Sitecore is creating for modules to extend XM Cloud. 

Well, actually they are talking about a hub to extend and customize Sitecore Products. So not limited to XM Cloud but the examples went in that direction and it does make sense. As you probably know Sitecore is heavily discouraging custom code on your XM Cloud - something that made the product in the beginning in the eyes of some not really "saas". Even though I am a developer and I always liked extending everything I do believe not putting custom code next to a product that should be SAAS is a good idea. We already had interaction points with several event webhooks. With this marketplace, we can also build real extensions into the editing UI.

 

There are a few levels in the marketplace - each will have a (slightly) different path to register your module.  A single tenant module can be used to extend the product to a use case for a single customer.  This can cover a very specific business need.  A next step is the multi-tenant module which is probably targeted at partners who want to build their own extensions and use them for multiple customers.

The public modules are available to everyone. They can be either free or paid but they must be approved by Sitecore to make sure the quality is good and the look and feel is similar to the original product. 

In order to achieve all this, there is an SDK:

 

Next

There is one more story to tell...  but that will be for part three in this years Sugcon series. 

SUGCON 2025 - part one and AI

SUGCON 2025 - Antwerp, Belgium

Yeah, Sugcon in Belgium. Which meant I could attend this edition.  As it is always a pleasure to meet up with people from the Sitecore community I was really looking forward to it and it did not disappoint me.

With a venue on approximately 60km away from my doorstep there was no hotel and flight for me. Instead I got a pleasant drive... up until you get a glimpse of the Antwerp skyline which also means: traffic jams 🙂

But we got safe and sound to a very sunny Antwerp and a tremendous venue with a view on the zoo. It should be no surprise that there was another traffic jam when entering the main room for the keynote as everyone was taking pictures

So venue is fine, weather is good and the crowd very nice. Now we just need some good content as well. Ready for take-off... 

Keynotes

I must admit that the keynotes were not really mind blowing nor unforgettable. Which is to be expected on an event like this - big announcements are for Symposium. Sugcon got simple, to-the-point keynotes with the usual AI buzz words and mentions of the community as one would suspect on a community event. 

I was nice to see all the familiar faces behind Dave O'Flanagan -  with Jason in plain sight but I'm also in there somewhere 🙂. 

AI

Of course AI was present in many presentations. Whether it was to generate the images in the presentation like Jason Wilkerson or as real main focus in the CCC demo from Morten Ljungberg. 

 

Morten showed us a demo of the possibilities with Sitecore Stream - the free version and the paid version with brand awareness. It looked pretty good (although his CCC/K joke was unaware of Belgian history). But the demo was nice and gave us a pretty good idea of how these things work.

Let's continue a bit more on the AI path as Vignesh Vishwanath woke us up on Friday with his talk on Stream in XP. 

He made it very clear that there are opportunities here. It also became clear that Stream is not only for the SAAS customers, but also available to those who didn't take that step (yet).  There is a free tier available that does include the basics - probably the biggest difference is the brand awareness, if you want that you will need to subscription version. 

At the moment in the CMS you can mostly generate content, but there is a roadmap to increase the possibilities and add more functionality within the product. 

One of the things that is coming would be help in translating - but with a translation company as a sponsor he also made it clear that this is AI translations and that those are not yet perfect 🙂

There were (lots) more interesting sessions of course. And also very interesting talks during the breaks. More of that in part two...