Month: February 2021

Different approaches to assign Sitecore SXA theme to a site

Last Updated on February 26, 2021 by sandeeppote

Once a tenant and site are created and/or a theme is manually created you may want to assign a theme to a site. A theme is automatically assigned when during a site creation but what if you want to assign a theme to already created site.

See this blog to create a tenant and site and different approaches of creating a theme.

Experience Editor

Select any Partial design and open experience editor select Experience Accelerator option.

Select Theme option. Change the theme.

This will also the change the theme in the selected site – /sitecore/content/<<tenant folder>>/<<tenant>>/<<site folder>>/<<site>>/Presentation/Page Designs

Content Editor

To change the theme for a specific site. Navigate to the site/Presentation/Page Designs

for e.g.:- /sitecore/content/<<tenant folder>>/<<tenant>>/<<site folder>>/<<site>>/Presentation/Page Designs

In the Styling section change the Theme field

Hope this helps.

Different approaches of creating Sitecore SXA themes

Last Updated on February 26, 2021 by sandeeppote

Themes define the look and feel of a site and makes it flexible to change the layout and design of the website.

Themes help to customize the appearance of the site which includes layout, typography, color and other design elements.

SXA come with two types of themes- Site and Base themes. To add own/custom classes and assets, such as styles, scripts, images and fonts use Site theme.

There are multiple ways site theme cane be created-

Option 1 – Add custom theme when creating a Site

Check out this blog post for adding a theme when creating a site

Option 2 – Add theme to existing Site (create theme manually)

Right click on your site- click Scripts and click New Site Theme option

Provide the theme name and location.

Click OK and a theme should be created on specified location

Option 3 – Add a theme using SXA CLI

Will add the details shortly.

Hope this helps!

Sitecore 10 SXA Site Structure

Last Updated on February 20, 2021 by sandeeppote

Previous blog shows how to create Tenant and SXA Site.

In this blog lets see what does the installation script adds to the SXA site.

Following is the site content structure-

1. Site

SXA site is a container to the content that will be used as a output of the site. Site contains the settings to select the Site Media Library, Theme Folder and Modules.

2. Home Page

This is the home page of the site. All other pages in the site must be stored under the Home item.

3. Media Folder

Media Folder helps scope the part of media library is available to content editors on the images selection dialog.

You can change the scope by adding or removing the folder in “Virtual” section “Additional Children” field.

Media Folder “Additional Children” field
Scoped item in media folder from Media Library
Scoped to the selected folders configured in “Additional Children” field

Best Practice – Do not put media items directly under the Media folder. Form SXA 1.7 and higher uploading items to media folder in the Site is not allowed.

4. Data Folder

Data Folder is the repository for storing all the data sources. These data sources can be reused across many pages scoped inside the Site. Data folder had component type folder and can be created manually or when the module is installed.

Data for each component can be created manually from the content tree or from experience editor by using the “Associated Content” option. Data folder is used as a source configured in rendering’s Data Source field in a form of query or directly mapped to the component folder.

Best Practice – Clean up unused data sources

Best Practice – Give Site data sources meaningful names

Best Practice – Organize site data sources in folders

Best Practice –Run source field reports to help set the data source context

5. Presentation

The presentation folder contains all the presentation related details and settings for the components selected while creating the site.

Presentation folder has list of components based on the modules selected while creating the site.

Presentation folder contains Page and Partial Designs, Layout Service , Available Renderings, Rendering Variants and Styles.

Rendering variant contains list of components on the site and can be customized using Variant Definition and Variant Fields. Also can use template based Variant like Scriban and Template

6. Settings

Settings folder contains site specific configuration. Site Grouping contains the Site Settings like site name, host name, database etc.

Settings also contains the Redirects, HTML snippets and Item Queries. Settings Folder contains options to select the Fav icon, error handling and other SEO related settings.

Sitecore 10 SXA-Create a tenant and Site

Last Updated on February 11, 2021 by sandeeppote

Tenant Folder

Sitecore supports multitenancy, which means you can have multiple sites running on a single Sitecore instance.

Tenant folder is just a container to hold multiple tenants you may have as a part of site structure. Inherited from _Base Tenant Folder. You may create a tenant folder to hold the multiple tenants of a Company.

A folder with provide tenant folder name is create here – /sitecore/templates/Project/<Tenant Folder Name>

Template Path – /sitecore/templates/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Multisite/Tenant Folder

Tenant

Tenant is a top-level container for the Sites underneath. Site in same tenant are related, that means they are able to share data and layouts. Creation of tenants comes with optional modules.

Template/sitecore/templates/Project/<<Tenant Folder>>/<<Tenant>>/Tenant

Tenant been created successfully.

Creating Site

Site is a collection of content and output with a common overall business objective sharing a common set of assets

To create site right click on Tenant and select an option to create Site or Site Folder

Site Folder –

Site folder is a container for multiple sites.

Template – /sitecore/templates/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Multisite/Site Folder

Site

General tab- Provide Site name, host name and Virtual folder. You may keep this as default and change later based on the requirements.

Select the required modules as a part of Site creation.

Create a new theme or select existing. This will e your site theme and can be changed from Page Design –

Template – /sitecore/content/<<tenant folder>>/<<tenant>>/<<site folder>>/<<site>>/Presentation/Page Designs

Select a grid mainly Bootstrap 4

At this point we have SXA site been created-

Remove Site

To remove Site, right click on site, select scripts and Remove Site option.