There is always remaining tasks you have to do in order to finalize a website. Out of this series I'd like to share my simple Meta Tag and Open Graph implementation in XM Cloud using Headless SXA, JSS and NextJs.
There are those features that you always have to implement when coming towards the end of the project and think about going live. robots.txt is one of them. In general the robots.txt is responsible for telling Search Engines what parts of the website to index and which ones not. That does not mean that Search Engines care. If you want to read more: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro Luckily Headless SXA provides that feature so you don't have to implement something yourself.
A nice and commonly used feature in SXA is the "not found" functionality. Sadly here is no from A-Z documentation and SXA defaults collide a bit with Sitecore defaults. So let's walk through setting up a Not Found Page as intended by general requirements. (Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash)
Sitecore 10 has been recently released with SXA 10. There has been a lot of feedback on the fresh SXA 10 CLI and the news are great: new commands to build and upload the whole theme without having to change a file and running the gulp watcher a dedicated sxa watch command is replacing the gulp watcher command Creative Exchange Live has been updated to run with node NodeJS 12 and Gulp Version 4 Also JQuery Version has been updated to 3.4.1 So how can you benefit from all that new stuff while running Sitecore and SXA 9.3?
Having different images to optimize the experience on different devices (or screen resolutions) is essential. Here's a quick implementation example on how to achieve that using Rendering Variants (Scriban or Items). A walk through from A to Z starting creating a module, clone a rendering, adjust the templat, create a custom experience button, creating the variants using items and scriban and installing the module to the site in order to test it.
A common task when implementing a website is to handle the height equality of components in one row even though the content might differ. SXA has an already inbuild solution.
When you have created Components and you figure out later that they are used always in a bunch of e.g. 3, or you want to prepare a one-time-drag-and-drop experience for the editor even though several components are involved (like in a header or a footer) then the component renderer (introduced with SXA 1.8) is a good solution for you.
Even though SXA is there since many years, adopting towards SXA seems to be a very slow process. When I heared of SXA in 2016 for the first time I directly fell in love with it. I managed to introduce it to a Multisite and Multilanguage Project end of 2017 and by working with it, I became an ambassador for SXA. Let's check out some material I recommend to see before getting started.
With Powershell Extensions for Sitecore you can run Powershell scripts in Sitecore. Also SXA is offering a bunch of Scripts supporting your activities. I recently had to run Powershell remotely. There is good Documentation out there but somehow I missed some pieces that stopped me from using that feature smoothly. So I try to connect the pieces of the puzzle in this blog post.
There are a lot of bricks and pieces on the web how to setup DNS for a local Site in SXA but no end to end description. At least I could not find it. Here's one from A-Z
See the Symposium 2019 talk of Natasha Batra and me (rerecorded) how Metronom developed a Multisite Solution at scale and walk through how we utilized the greadt potential of SXA to accelerate.
In case you run several websites in one Sitecore instance and need to distinguish users between those different sites here’s what we did.
