The Future of Sitecore: What We Learned from Symposium 2019
Nov 25, 2019 • 2 Minute Read • Elizabeth Spranzani, Chief Technology Officer
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24 Hours, 24 Selfies, 88 Slices
Mar 08, 2018 • 2 Minute Read
The Sitecore Hackathon took place last weekend, and our team was more fired up than I've ever seen them. Add Verndale-sponsored pizza and selfies to the mix, and the 24 hours of Sitecore fun got a bit more interesting.
We had 11 team members participate this year from five global locations including: Boston, Vermont, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Quito, Ecuador. Our Sitecore experts, including a handful of Sitecore MVPs, were tasked with developing hackathon entries that fell within the following categories and had to be built on the latest version of Sitecore (Sitecore 9 update 1).
Sitecore Commerce
A powerful framework for content and commerce, ideal for B2C, B2B, and B2X brands selling online, Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) uses everything you know about your customers to deliver shopping experiences that are shaped by their interaction history and context, transforming prospects into lifelong fans.
JSS
JSS is a complete SDK for JavaScript developers, allowing users to build full-fledged solutions using Sitecore and modern JavaScript UI libraries and frameworks (React.js and Angular). You can develop while completely disconnected from Sitecore and get started without a Sitecore install. Deploy apps in a physically decoupled way ("headless") to any platform and to virtually any cloud with full Sitecore Experience Platform capability preserved, including Experience Editor, Personalization, MV testing and Tracking / Analytics.
SxA
Web development teams use Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) to speed up the production of websites and to reuse components, layouts, and templates across a variety of sites.
xConnect
xConnect is the service layer that sits in between the xDB and any trusted client, device, or interface that wants to read, write, or search xDB data.
So, what did they build?
Cool stuff. Within the category of Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), a couple of our team members took inspiration from the existing "Sticky Notes" feature within SXA and cranked it up a notch. Their work exemplifies a custom pipeline so if there are sticky notes associated with a item, those sticky notes will be available in Content Editor as well. That way, messaging within the sticky note is not hidden inside Experience Editor and can be made more visible for users. Dive into further documentation details, here.
More cool stuff. Staying within the SXA category, another group of team members worked on the Location Map – Point of Interest Module which allows users to add this module to any page of a website experience. By dynamically using SXA, users can preview the results in real-time. Dive into further documentation details, here.
Even cooler stuff. Utilizing xConnect, one of our teams created a heat map of user click interactions, stored in xDB, which could then be overlaid onto a page in Experience Manager, to show where the users were interacting. Going forward the xDB data could be utilized to understand where certain user segments are interacting with the pages, as well as aid A/B testing. Dive into further documentation details, here.
And, now for the whole reason you're reading this post in the first place… pizza-induced selfies!
If you want to learn more about our Sitecore expertise, or chat with any of our MVPs, give us a shout!