In this article by Yogesh Patel, the author of the book, Sitecore Cookbook for Developers, we will discuss about the importance of Sitecore and its good features.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Why Sitecore?

Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) is not only an enterprise-level content management system (CMS), but rather a web framework or web platform, which is the global leader in experience management. It continues to be very popular because of its highly scalable and robust architecture, continuous innovations, and ease of implementations compared to other CMSs available. It also provides an easier integration with many external platforms such as customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, and so on.

Sitecore architecture is built with the Microsoft .NET framework and provides greater depth of APIs, flexibility, scalability, performance, and power to developers. It has great out-of-the-box capabilities, but one of its great strengths is the ease of extending these capabilities; hence, developers love Sitecore!

Sitecore provides many features and functionalities out of the box to help content owners and marketing teams. These features can be extended and highly customized to meet the needs of your unique business rules. Sitecore provides these features with different user-friendly interfaces for content owners that helps them manage content and media easily and quickly. Sitecore user interfaces are supported on almost every modern browser. In addition, fully customized web applications can be layered in and integrated with other modules and tools using Sitecore as the core platform.

It helps marketers to optimize the flow of content continuously for better results and more valuable outcomes. It also provides in-depth analytics, personalized experience to end users, and marketing automation tools, which play a significant role for marketing teams.

The following are a few of the many features of Sitecore.

CMS based on the .NET Framework

Sitecore provides building components on ASP.NET Web forms as well as ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks, so developers can choose either approach to match the required architecture. Sitecore provides web controls and sublayouts while working with ASP.NET web forms and view rendering, controller rendering, and models and item rendering while working with the ASP.NET MVC framework.

Sitecore also provides two frameworks to prepare user interface (UI) applications for Sitecore clients—Sheer UI and SPEAK. Sheer UI applications are prepared using Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and most of the Sitecore applications are prepared using Sheer UI. Sitecore Process Enablement and Accelerator Kit (SPEAK) is the latest framework to develop Sitecore applications with a consistent interface quickly and easily. SPEAK gives you a predefined set of page layouts and components:

features-sitecore-img-0

Component-based architecture

Sitecore is built on a component-based architecture, which provides us with loosely coupled independent components. The main advantage of these components is their reusability and loosely coupled independent behaviour. It aims to provide reusability of components at the page level, site level, and Sitecore instance level to support multisite or multitenant sites.

Components in Sitecore are built with the normal layered approach, where the components are split into layers such as presentation, business logic, data layer, and so on. Sitecore provides different presenation components, including layouts, sublayouts, web control renderings, MVC renderings, and placeholders.

Sitecore manages different components in logical grouping by their templates, layouts, sublayouts, renderings, devices, media, content items, and so on:

features-sitecore-img-1

Layout engine

The Sitecore layout engine extends the ASP.NET web application server to merge content with presentation logic dynamically when web clients request resources.

A layout can be a web form page (.aspx) or MVC view (.cshtml) file. A layout can have multiple placeholders to place content on predefined places, where the controls are placed. Controls can be HTML markup controls such as a sublayout (.ascx) file, MVC view (.cshtml) file, or other renderings such as web control, controller rendering, and so on, which can contain business logic.

Once the request criteria are resolved by the layout engine, such as item, language, and device, the layout engine creates a platform to render different controls and assemble their output to relevant placeholders on the layout.

Layout engine provides both static and dynamic binding. So, with dynamic binding, we can have clean HTML markups and reusability of all the controls or components. Binding of controls, layouts, and devices can be applied on Sitecore content items itself, as shown in the following screenshot:

features-sitecore-img-2

Once the layout engine renders the page, you can see how the controls will be bound to the layout, as shown in the following image:

features-sitecore-img-3

The layout engine in Sitecore is reponsible for layout rendering, device detection, rule engine, and personalization:

features-sitecore-img-4

Multilingual support

In Sitecore, content can be maintained in any number of languages. It provides easier integration with external translation providers for seamless translation and also supports the dynamic creation of multilingual web pages. Sitecore also supports the language fallback feature on the field, item, and template level, which makes life easier for content owners and developers. It also supports chained fallback.

Multi-device support

Devices represent different types of web clients that connect to the Internet and place HTTP requests. Each device represents a different type of web client. Each device can have unique markup requirements. As we saw, the layout engine applies the presentation components specified for the context device to the layout details of the context item. In the same way, developers can use devices to format the context item output using different collections of presentation components for various types of web clients. Dynamically assembled content can be transformed to conform to virtually any output format, such as a mobile, tablet, desktop, print, or RSS.

Sitecore also supports the device fallback feature so that any web page not supported for the requesting device can still be served through the fallback device. It also supports chained fallback for devices.

Multi-site capabilities

There are many ways to manage multisites on a single Sitecore installation.

For example, you can host multiple regional domains with different regional languages as the default language for a single site. For example, http://www.sitecorecookbook.com will serve English content, http://www.sitecorecookbook.de will serve German content of the same website, and so on.

Another way is to create multiple websites for different subsidiaries or franchise of a company. In this approach, you can share some common resources across all the sites such as templates, renderings, user interface elements, and other content or media items, but have unique content and pages so that you can find a separate existence of each website in Sitecore. Sitecore has security capabilities so that each franchise or subsidiary can manage their own website independently without affecting other websites. Developers have full flexibility to re-architect Sitecore's multisite architecture as per business needs.

Sitecore also supports multitenant multisite architecture so that each website can work as an individual physical website.

Caching

Caching plays a very important role in website performance. Sitecore contains multiple levels of caching such as prefetch cache, data cache, item cache, and HTML cache. Apart from this, Sitecore creates different caching such as standard values cache, filtered item cache, registry cache, media cache, user cache, proxy cache, AccessResult cache, and so on. This makes understanding all the Sitecore caches really important. Sitecore caching is a very vast topic to cover; you can read more about it at http://sitecoreblog.patelyogesh.in/2013/06/how-sitecore-caching-work.html.

Configuration factory

Sitecore is configured using IIS's configuration file, Web.config. Sitecore configuration factory allows you to configure pipelines, events, scheduling agents, commands, settings, properties, and configuration nodes in Web.config files, which can be defined in the /configuration/sitecore path. Configurations inside this path can be spread out between multiple files to make it scalable. This process is often called config patching.

Instead of touching the Web.config file, Sitecore provides the Sitecore.config file in the App_ConfigInclude directory, which contains all the important Sitecore configurations. Functionality-specific configurations are split into the number of .config files based, which you can find in its subdirectories. These .config files are merged into a single configuration file at runtime, which you can evaluate using http://<domain>/sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx.

Thus, developers create custom .config files in the App_ConfigInclude directory to introduce, override, or delete settings, properties, configuration nodes, and attributes without touching Sitecore's default .config files. This makes managing .config files very easy from development to deployment. You can learn more about file patching from https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/60/include_file_patching_facilities_sc6orlater-a4.pdf.

Dependency injection in .NET has become very common nowadays. If you want to build a generic and reusable functionality, you will surely go for the inversion of control (IoC) framework. Fortunately, Sitecore provides a solution that will allow you to easily use different IoC frameworks between projects. Using patch files, Sitecore allows you to define objects that will be available at runtime. These nodes are defined under /configuration/sitecore and can be retrieved using the Sitecore API. We can define types, constructors, methods, properties, and their input parameters in logical nodes inside nodes of pipelines, events, scheduling agents, and so on. You can learn more examples of it from http://sitecore-community.github.io/docs/documentation/Sitecore%20Fundamentals/Sitecore%20Configuration%20Factory/.

Pipelines

An operation to be performed in multiple steps can be carried out using the pipeline system, where each individual step is defined as a processor. Data processed from one processor is then carried to the next processor in arguments. The flow of the pipeline can be defined in XML format in the .config files. You can find default pipelines in the Sitecore.config file or patch file under the <pipelines> node (which are system processes) and the <processors> node (which are UI processes). The following image visualizes the pipeline and processors concept:

features-sitecore-img-5

Each processor in a pipeline contains a method named Process() that accepts a single argument, Sitecore.Pipelines.PipelineArgs, to get different argument values and returns void. A processor can abort the pipeline, preventing Sitecore from invoking subsequent processors.

A page request traverses through different pipelines such as <preProcessRequest>, <httpRequestBegin>, <renderLayout>, <httpRequestEnd>, and so on. The <httpRequestBegin> pipeline is the heart of the Sitecore HTTP request execution process. It defines different processors to resolve the site, device, language, item, layout, and so on sequentially, which you can find in Sitecore.config as follows:

<httpRequestBegin>

  ...

  <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.SiteResolver, 
    Sitecore.Kernel"/>

  <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.UserResolver, 
    Sitecore.Kernel"/>

  <processor type="
    Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.DatabaseResolver, 
    Sitecore.Kernel"/>

  <processor type="
    Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.BeginDiagnostics, 
    Sitecore.Kernel"/>

  <processor type="
    Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.DeviceResolver, 
    Sitecore.Kernel"/>

  <processor type="
    Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.LanguageResolver, 
    Sitecore.Kernel"/>

  ...

</httpRequestBegin>

There are more than a hundred pipelines, and the list goes on increasing after every new version release. Sitecore also allows us to create our own pipelines and processors.

Background jobs

When you need to do some long-running operations such as importing data from external services, sending e-mails to subscribers, resetting content item layout details, and so on, we can use Sitecore jobs, which are asynchronous operations in the backend that you can monitor in a foreground thread (Job Viewer) of Sitecore Rocks or by creating a custom Sitecore application.

The jobs can be invoked from the user interface by users or can be scheduled. Sitecore provides APIs to invoke jobs with many different options available. You can simply create and start a job using the following code:

public void Run()

{

  JobOptions options = new JobOptions("Job Name", "Job Category", 
    "Site Name", "current object", "Task Method to Invoke", new 
    object[] { rootItem })

  {

    EnableSecurity = true,

    ContextUser = Sitecore.Context.User,

    Priority = ThreadPriority.AboveNormal

  };

  JobManager.Start(options);

}

You can schedule tasks or jobs by creating scheduling agents in the Sitecore.config file. You can also set their execution frequency. The following example shows you how Sitecore has configured PublishAgent, which publishes a site every 12 hours and simply executes the Run() method of the Sitecore.Tasks.PublishAgent class:

<scheduling>

  <agent type="Sitecore.Tasks.PublishAgent" method="Run" 
    interval="12:00:00">

    <param desc="source database">master</param>

    <param desc="target database">web</param>

    <param desc="mode (full or smart or 
      incremental)">incremental</param>

    <param desc="languages">en, da</param>

  </agent>

</scheduling>

Apart from this, Sitecore also provides you with the facility to define scheduled tasks in the database, which has a great advantage of storing tasks in the database, so that we can handle its start and end date and time. We can use it once or make it recurring as well.

Workflow and publishing

Workflows are essential to the content author experience. Workflows ensure that items move through a predefined set of states before they become publishable. It is necessary to ensure that content receives the appropriate reviews and approvals before publication to the live website. Apart from workflow, Sitecore provides highly configurable security features, access permissions, and versioning. Sitecore also provides full workflow history like when and by whom the content was edited, reviewed, or approved. It also allows you to restrict publishing as well as identify when it is ready to be published.

Publishing is an essential part of working in Sitecore. Every time you edit or create new content, you have to publish it to see it on your live website.

When publishing happens, the item is copied from the master database to the web database. So, the content of the web database will be shown on the website. When multiple users are working on different content pages or media items, publishing restrictions and workflows play a vital role to make releases, embargoed, or go-live successful.

There are three types of publishing available in Sitecore:

Republish: This publishes every item even though items are already published.

Smart Publish: Sitecore compares the internal revision identifier of the item in the master and web databases. If both identifiers are different, it means that the item is changed in the master database, hence Sitecore will publish the item or skip the item if identifiers are the same.

Incremental Publish: Every modified item is added to the publish queue. Once incremental publishing is done, Sitecore will publish all the items found in the publish queue and clear it.

Sitecore also supports the publishing of subitems as well as related items (such as publishing a content item will also publish related media items).

Search

Sitecore comes with out-of-the-box Lucene support. You can also switch your Sitecore search to Solr, which just needs to install Solr and enable Solr configurations already available.

Sitecore by default indexes Sitecore content in Lucene index files. The Sitecore search engine lets you search through millions of items of the content tree quickly with the help of different types of queries with Lucene or Solr indexes.

Sitecore provides you with the following functionalities for content search:

We can search content items and documents such as PDF, Word, and so on. It allows you to search content items based on preconfigured fields.

It provides APIs to create and search composite fields as per business needs.

It provides content search APIs to sort, filter, and page search results.

We can apply wildcards to search complex results and autosuggest.

We can apply boosting to influence search results or elevate results by giving more priority.

We can create custom dictionaries and index files, using which we can suggest did you mean kind of suggestions to users.

We can apply facets to refine search results as we can see on e-commerce sites.

W can apply different analyzers to hunt MoreLikeThis results or similar results.

We can tag content or media items to categorize them so that we can use features such as a tag cloud.

It provides a scalable user interface to search content items and apply filters and operations to selected search results.

It provides different indexing strategies to create transparent and diverse models for index maintenance.

In short, Sitecore allows us to implement different searching techniques, which are available in Google or other search engines.

Content authors always find it difficult while working with a big number of items. You can read more about Sitecore search at https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/content_authoring/searching/searching.

Security model

Sitecore has the reputation of being very easy to set up the security of users, roles, access rights, and so on. Sitecore follows the .NET security model, so we get all the basic information of the .NET membership in Sitecore, which offers several advantages:

A variety of plug-and-play features provided directly by Microsoft

The option to replace or extend the default configuration with custom providers

It is also possible to store the accounts in different storage areas using several providers simultaneously

Sitecore provides item-level and field-level rights and an option to create custom rights as well

Dynamic user profile structure and role management is possible just through the user interface, which is simpler and easier compared to pure ASP.NET solutions

It provides easier implementation for integration with external systems

Even after having an extended wrapper on the .NET solution, we get the same performance as a pure ASP.NET solution

Experience analytics and personalization

Sitecore contains state-of-the-art Analysis, Insights, Decisions, Automation (AIDA) framework, which is the heart for marketing programs. It provides comprehensive analytics data and reports, insights from every website interaction with rules, behavior-based personalization, and marketing automation. Sitecore collects all the visitor interactions in a real-time, big data repository—Experience Database (xDB)—to increase the availability, scalability, and performance of website.

Sitecore Marketing Foundation provides the following features:

Sitecore uses MongoDB, a big marketing data repository that collects all customer interactions. It provides real-time data to marketers to automate interactions across all channels.

It provides a unified 360 degree view of the individual website visitors and in-depth analytics reports.

It provides fundamental analytics measurement components such as goals and events to evaluate the effectiveness of online business and marketing campaigns.

It provides comprehensive conditions and actions to achieve conditional and behavioral or predictive personalization, which helps show customers what they are looking for instead of forcing them to see what we want to show.

Sitecore collects, evaluates, and processes Omnichannel visitor behavioral patterns, which helps better planned effective marketing campaigns and improved user experience.

Sitecore provides an engagement plan to control how your website interacts with visitors. It helps nurture relationships with your visitors by adapting personalized communication based on which state they are falling.

Sitecore provides an in-depth geolocation service, helpful in optimizing campaigns through segmentation, personalization, and profiling strategies.

The Sitecore Device Detection service is helpful in personalizing user experience or promotions based on the device they use.

It provides different dimensions and reports to reflect data on full taxonomy provided in Marketing Control Panel. It provides different charting controls to get smart reports.

It has full flexibility for developers to customize or extend all these features.

High performance and scalability

Sitecore supports heavy content management and content delivery usage with a large volume of data. Sitecore is architected for high performance and unlimited scalability.

Sitecore cache engine provides caching on the raw data as well as rendered output data, which gives a high-performance platform. Sitecore uses the event queue concept for scalability. Theoretically, it makes Sitecore scalable to any number of instances under a load balancer.

Summary

In this article, we discussed about the importance of Sitecore and its good features. We also saw that Sitecore XP is not only an enterprise-level CMS, but also a web platform, which is the global leader in experience management.