Sitecore Symposium 2020

My 2 cents on The Virtual Edition

Note that I'm being optimistic and wrote "The" virtual edition instead of the "First" virtual symposium. Not that this virtual experience was all bad - certainly not. I saw some inspiring presentations, had a few good chats and I even found some benefits as well - no overlap in sessions making it easier to watch them all and... you can easily sneak out of the room if the session is not what you actually expected :)  I didn't get to enlarge my collections though:

This post is not an overview of the big announcements this year. Nor a list of highlights and most remarkable moments. I can safely make the assumptions that those will be covered already by others - Sitecore themselves, Adam Seabridge and others. I will just share some screenshots to show how the Sitecore interface might look like in the (near) future:

Still here? Good.. as I did want to write a small post about my 2020 Symposium experience. First of all, I did miss.. you! Yes, you. And you, and all the other members of our great Sitecore community. Before each symposium we take a look at the agenda and dream away when we read session titles that promise us great knowledge. But what we usually remember from each symposium are the moments outside the sessions - not just the fun (ok, yes, there is some fun..) but also the people. Getting to know the people within the Sitecore community and/or company. People who you might have helped already, or who you might help in their future Sitecore endeavors. And if you get stuck, they will probably help you as well.

Luckily we had some chats.. on Slack, on some virtual chat platform.. and on the second day we even found a breakfast Teams chat session with Sitecorians and a bunch of eager developers. And in these times, anything is better than nothing - it was good to hear other people thoughts on the announcements and evolutions.

Was it all so bad? No, it wasn't even bad! I'm glad I joined virtual Sym. And I did see some good sessions. Note that sessions are still available so you still have some time to catch up. Of course you have the keynotes, the sessions on containers with CaaS, Content Hubs and rendering hosts that you should (have) see(n) but we also got a lot of on-demand sessions to fill the rainy lockdown days. 

If you have an interest in SXA, you should watch the best practices session by Adam & Mark. And after that got you warmed up, continue by watching Una -always good for an interesting session- amplifying her SXA. As I skipped the marketing, business and commerce sessions I can't tell you about hidden gems in those areas but I do remember some nice stuff on Content Hub, on Web push notifications and I learned a few extra things on Solr, Azure and EXM. I'm not going to share more details or screenshots - I'm just giving ideas, you should watch them yourself ;)

Creating shorter sessions was a good idea - I really liked the 30' format and the on-demand sessions are usually even shorter. 

Symposium 2020 did deliver what I expected - I did learn some new things and got to interact a bit. The shorter sessions and on-demand videos to watch afterwards are good ideas and might also work in a non-virtual edition. We might evolve to a combination - take the best of both experiences, let people interact live and give some content for those whom can't travel. But nobody knows.. lets just hope we can all meet in Vegas next year 🤗

  

This was 2019 - Sitecore Symposium & such

2019 - Sitecore Symposium

Sitecore Symposium is done – and so is 2019. Well, almost. Winter is coming.. and so is Sitecore 9.3. Almost.

You probably already read many posts about the big new announcements – Sitecore SaaS and Sitecore AI. If not, you should. Or you can also watch the videos of the keynotes now.

Horizon - the editing experience

It is exciting news. The experience for customers will change with Horizon as the new editing environment.

This project was announced a few symposia ago – we saw a first somewhat working demo last year and with Sitecore 9.3 we should will see the first version. As this first version will be limited -and also optional- the currently known editors (content and experience) will remain in place until Horizon is mature enough to take their place and become the full-fledged new experience. Probably combined with Content Hub, as Sitecore is making good progress with the integration of the StyleLabs SaaS platform that was acquired last year.

New development experience

But not only the editors should be excited. Also developers working with Sitecore will see new stuff in the future versions as this SaaS platform is bound to change things.

We will see more .net core and other enhancements to make our development experience evolve (in a good direction – I think).

Sympo and more...

But Symposium was so much more. We had a Magic-al basketball player with one of the most remarkable keynote sessions of the last symposia – I’m sure lots of people will remember this for a long time. It doesn’t happen a lot that you witness a Mexican wave going through a Sitecore crowd just because the speaker is walking between the audience (and everyone wants a picture).  And he had something interesting to say too:

Even @MagicJohnson is saying to think outside the box. I guess my beyond the box session on #SXA fits that picture. Use it, and go beyond 😉 #SitecoreSYM pic.twitter.com/zmiYHVCatz

— Gert Gullentops (@Gatagordo) November 7, 2019

SXA

Which brings me to a personal highlight of this years Symposium: I was able to give an enhanced session on SXA – using it and going beyond the out-of-the-box stuff. I did spend a lot of time preparing it as during the preparation Sitecore decided to give me the 9.3 preview (one of the benefits of being mvp), including some new fancy (Scriban) features which I had to include (and customize) in the presentation. But it was fun, and I think it went well - so I might do that again next year. Or maybe I’ll try SugCon, or a non-Belux user group, … we’ll see what 2020 brings us.

Breakouts

Symposium is not only keynotes with big speakers and/or announcements. There are lots of breakout sessions and I must say the overall quality of those was rather high this year. There was mine of course (😊), and my co-Reffer Bart’s on Forms (😊) but I enjoyed several others as well. Matthew Dubbs (Test Specialist @ Sitecore) did a very good job on stage and thought me a few tips on performance testing (remember the robot detection and analytics cookie).  SXA Blues Brothers Mark & Adam showed us a few new things in SXA 9.3 (Scriban …) and the Corey/Gary duo managed to introduce us to Blazor and show that headless is not necessarily Javascript (well done guys – can’t be easy doing this so remote).  Alexey Vaschenko had the honor of presenting Horizon and especially how we (developers) will be able to extend it with Sitecore Host plugins  - can’t wait to try that!

Sorry for those who I forgot to mention – so many sessions, I couldn’t attend all of them…  Some speakers already shared their presentations – and Sitecore just released all slides as well – so you might want to check those (or attend a local user group session as some presentations are repeated there).

Luckily for us, in between five exhausting days of Symposium sessions and Sitecore MVP sessions, we also found some time to

check the local wildlife

visit Harry Potter

play ball with some fellow MVP's

enjoy an Orlando Magic victory with my colleagues from The Reference

do some #HedgieHunt - even though we had so little time, and speakers didn't get one ☹  - my hedgie collection has a new addition

And most importantly meet, greet, talk, drink and mingle with other attendees and share ideas and silly small talk with Sitecore community members.

If this all sounds like music to your ears, get ready to join the 2020 Symposium in Chicago 😉

2019

Yes, 2019 was a remarkable year.  It started with a renewed MVP title and the release of a new website for Fluxys – an exciting SXA project we had been working on (and still are).

Together with a few colleagues I decided to get (back) on my bike and climb the legendary Mont Ventoux. It took a lot of training, sweat, painful knees and a variety of swear-words. Especially during the hilly trainings, I wondered what the hell I was doing. But in June I was on top of the mountain, and it was such a monstrous experience… I’ll probably do that again in 2020.

The sad news was that I had to say goodbye to my good pet/friend Jef - after 11 years he got hit by a car (actually his 2nd time, but this time fatal).

RIP my good friend Jef. It has been 11 wonderful years 😿😭😿 pic.twitter.com/yx96pYbgU9

— Gert Gullentops (@Gatagordo) September 24, 2019

Together with all my other cats he perked up my Symposium presentation though. And the house is filled with a few kittens now.


And so 2019 is almost over, MVP application is done...  just one more Sitecore upgrade to finish, one more Sitecore presentation to give, a Sugcon call-for-papers to answer,  and then make sure that tree is cat-friendly.




We see 2020 at the Horizon..  Get ready for a tremendous year!

SXA beyond the box - Sitecore Symposium 2019

SXA beyond the box

November 6^th 2019. Orlando.

I had the honor and pleasure to present a session on the Sitecore Symposium 2019 in Orlando. Spreading knowledge on one of my favorite work-related topics: Sitecore SXA.

As we already had sessions explaining the basics of SXA I thought it might be time to have a session that went one step further. So I proposed the idea, got selected, and started creating the presentation.

The presentation is using user stories from the Fluxys project that I worked on recently to show some examples on how you can tweak SXA to your needs. We start by explaining the basic out-of-the-box options to customize renderings and continue towards more advanced examples. The presentation stays vague about all the code details but those are covered in blogs posts.

As a nice extra, I managed to show how to extend one of the very new features that come with SXA 9.3: Scriban variants.

This post includes the presentation and an overview of the mentioned blog post and documentation articles.

The presentation

SXA beyond the box from Gert Gullentops

Sources

Best practices working with variants

• Customize views per site
• Copy and customize (clone) a SXA rendering

SXA search overview

• Search overview pages
• Search scope and using it in a custom component
• Create your own search query tokens with SXA

Rendering variants

• Create a custom rendering variant definition
• Create a custom token for a rendering variant
• Tokens in rendering variants

Using external data in SXA

Rules engine

• Personalization on partial designs 
• Selecting page designs

In need of a new feature?

The process to go through when considering building a custom SXA component vs leveraging an OOTB feature - delivered by Adam - Mr. SXA.

SXA Page lists

• Item queries in page lists
• Custom code as datasource for a page list

Writing unit tests - even with index queries.

Scriban

• Documentation on Scriban itself
• What's new in SXA 9.3 - Scriban
• Create a custom Scriban extension

The Sitecore community

• Sitecore Stack Exchange
• Slack 

Sitecore Symposium 2016 (New Orleans)

Sitecore Symposium 2016 : a developer view

New Orleans: city of lively music, amusing drinks, po-boy beignets and the 2016 Sitecore Symposium. 

In this post I will share some of my thoughts on attended sessions from a developers point of view. A bit more in-depth information on some topics will follow: blogged and presented on SUG Belux.

Starting the event with a brass band immediately set the tone: this was going to be an experience! Where did we here that word before... and again. In the keynote, between the announcements of the Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), serious updates to Path Analyzer and EXM, or the new Commerce vNext. Not to forget Sitecore on Azure.

Day 1

The developer keynote was a good news show for developers with the "best practices" called Helix (Habitat is the example), a view on the open standards being used, .net core being embraced, a Sitecore nuget, and a move to more open source projects (Rocks, PathFinder, SIM, ...). But the main focus was community. Cool!

The community website should be known to all. The Slack channels get more and more users and usually someone is always there to answer your Sitecore question (in between the small talk). We should not forget Twitter, the many blogs out there and the user groups all over the world - including the amazing SugCon in Copenhagen this year. And recently a dedicated StackExchange site went in to beta. Proud to be part of all this!

xConnect

My first session was about xConnect. A promising new framework that should give us an (easy) API to work with analytics data. Sitecore will be using the framework itself in several modules. We will be able to use it to integrate all kinds of external data into xDB (write) or get all sorts of combined data out of xDB (read) to be used in code or external tools (e.g. Power BI). xConnext is not yet available, but will be shortly.

Commerce vNext

"Sitecore Commerce vNext is a brand new, state of the art commerce engine, designed from the ground up as an integral part of the Sitecore Experience Platform, built on ASP.NET Core." That's what they say. Sounds good though, and in just a few more months  we should be able to test if it. The demo showed a nicely integrated platform with lots of options in the box, but also an architecture that should provide lots of integration points where custom development - 'Plugins" -  can be hooked into the processes.

Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)

Mentioned in two keynotes, so this SXA must be the new hype in Sitecore land. As it all looks nice with lots of "buts", I can't make up my mind on this one. It's something to look at and investigate further, that's for sure. It has some great features to rapidly create new sites and/or pages without the need for a developer. Front-end developers will be pleased to hear that in a future version we should be able to choose the grid system. It's a module with great opportunities but also with some challenges for implementation partners. Update-1 should be available in the very near future...


We finished our day with a warm-up in the partner pavillion, getting ready for the party in the House of Blues. This turned out to be quite an experience (didn't use that word enough so far). But this is a developers view so nor drinks nor a stage filled with Sitecore-women sounds interesting, right?

Day 2

The keynote of day 2 can be captured in: "Play hard. Work hard.". Sounds like a plan! 

Multi-lingual

I started the sessions with a view on how to conquer languages in Sitecore. We got an interesting round-up of what the current language fallback can do and how to use it. Unfortunately I got the feeling that the audience (including myself) hoped for some more real-life solutions to multi-lingual (sometimes combined with multi-site) issues. I hope I could help some people by pointing them to our EasyLingo module on the marketplace, and would be pleased to get feedback.

Security

After missing Bas Lijten's session at SugCon Copenhagen this year, I had to attend this time. Although his demo got pwned the session still provided some good information on presumably basic security settings that are unfortunately still not always tackled. I would like to point to Bas' project on GitHub on security in Sitecore projects. I must admit I didn't find the time to really check it out but it is definitely on my radar and should be on yours too.

Testing

Next in line was Dan Solovay - a fully seated session on unit testing in a Sitecore project.  Based on Sitecore 8.2, which made the session very interesting. The majority of the audience was already aware of FakeDB and unit testing principles, but Dan managed to point out some tips and tricks not everyone knew. And the new capabilities in Sitecore caused by the move towards interfaces and virtual functions are very promising for test-driven developers. If you are interested in unit-testing, make sure to check the information on Dan's blog.

Publishing

They saved the best for last... the new publishing service presented by Stephen Pope looks very good. It's a complete new way of handling the publishing, making it a separate service that handles it's stuff in bulk operations making it very fast and robust.

It's a very lightweight process on .net core. An interface was created in the Sitecore admin to see what is going on in the publish service, and developers will be pleased to know that there is also a debug mode allowing you to follow all the steps in a console window. The service is a first version now in Sitecore 8.2 and will evolve as some topics are still in the backlog, but it's already a huge change in a part of the framework that hadn't truly changed since..  well, a long time. Sites that need to handle large publishes will surely benefit and it will become easier for content editors as they don't need to know about different publishes nor need to wait for a counter that goes up to..  And as icing on the cake: "publish site" is gone! (except for admins who know where they have hidden the button).

Final

The final keynote gave us a sneak of the future, but if you want to know about that: start saving for Las Vegas 2017!

Conclusion

It was a great event. An experience (did I use it enough now?). It truly was. A symposium is a place to meet people. Which I did. A chance to say hi to guys you only see online the rest of the year because they reside in Sri Lanka (Chaturanga) or in the far away Netherlands (Bas, Robbert, ...) and to meet new people - and I surely still missed some guys.

A symposium is also a place to catch up on new stuff, get some insights, tips and tricks to create even better Sitecore solutions. And I did.

Although it might look quite impossible to make the next symposium even better, I would like to give one remark for the organizing team. Based upon feedback that I heard from several people after different sessions I would suggest to give session some sort of "level" indication. Now the sessions are divided between developers, marketers and business people which is good but in quite a few cases attendants came out of a session disappointed because they learned (almost) nothing. Sessions at a lower level are very useful and needed for a part of the audience, but there are quite a few experts as well - so it would be nice to know upfront what the target of the session is. It's probably more difficult then it sounds but I'm quite sure it would make the experience even better.

Experience!