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?