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.