Migrating to XM Cloud

XM Cloud is the CMS of Sitecore’s new Composable DXP. It is a further development of their original CMS, but packed and serviced completely different. It’s SaaS, less hassle to maintain, quicker and easier to develop on, a lot easier to work with for content editors, but still as powerful and versatile as before. So …

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XM Cloud DevOps pipeline

The easiest way to deploy your project to your XM Cloud instance is manually via the Sitecore Cloud Portal. If you go to the XM Cloud Deploy dashboard, you can not only create projects and environments, but also start a “Build and deploy” process for a specific environment. While that might seem convenient and perfectly …

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Default SCS in XM Cloud

When I started working with the XM Cloud setup on my local development environment using the Docker container images provided by Sitecore, I added some content serialization config files and enthusiastically started creating data templates, rendering items and demo content. I then had to switch to another project for a bit, stopped my containers and …

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Focal point crop 3.0: go React!

It took a little longer than planned, but I have finally released a completely new version of my Focal point cropping extension for Content Hub, version 3.0. This new version contains a React version of the external page components Focal point editor and Public link viewer (I have slightly changed the names of the components). …

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External page components in CH4.2

To improve performance and add new features, Content Hub is replacing the front-end Knockout framework with React from 4.2.x going forward. Using React should also make it easier to develop custom components. This is of course great news, but it also introduced an issue for those being used to building custom external page components that …

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Content Hub API integrations

For quite a while, Action Scripts do not support the use of System.Net.Http.HttpClient anymore and I think that is a good measure to prevent action scripts from doing external (API) calls and enforce an implementation via either an API call action type, or an Azure event hub or service bus action. So what is the …

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Focal point crop 2.0

Public links are pre-generated and cached on CDN, and transformations are generated on-the-fly. Also, public links can be custom cropped, thus the algorithm can be influenced to obtain the desired result of focal point cropping; while transformations can only be either cropped ‘smart’ or centered. Those two reasons steered me in the direction of basing …

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Focal point crop v1.1

Within a few days after launching my focal point crop extension for Content Hub, I already improved my extension quite a bit. Originally, I replaced the original Entity image viewer component, with the idea to add this new focal point functionality as unobtrusive as possible. In practice, however, this proved to have some disadvantages: my …

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Content Hub: Focal point crop

Content Hub has multiple cropping strategies as you might know: crop to center, smart crop and custom crop. Smart cropping is “a feature that intelligently examines the content of an image and automatically focuses on the most important part of an image for cropping”, as the documentation states. Although the result is often spot on, …

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PaaS to AKS: more scripts!

A valuable update to our boilerplate This blog post is part of a series about building a production ready Continuous Integration setup for Sitecore using K8s containers on AKS. For more information and other articles on this subject check out the series index. As you might have read in my previous blog post, we are aiming …

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