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What’s new in Sitecore 9.1

What’s new in Sitecore 9.1

At this year’s Sitecore Symposium, Sitecore shared details of the great new features arriving in Sitecore 9.1 that will benefit everyone from developers to marketers, by offering enhancements in everything from machine learning to aid personalisation down to headless support for JavaScript developers.

Sitecore Cortex

Version 9 was the first introduction to Sitecore Cortex name, which is represents the machine learning capabilities found within Sitecore. In version 9 this was limited to Engagement Value, Optimisation and Path Analysis. Version 9.1 however is building on this base by introducing 3 new Cortex powered capabilities to the platform.

Personalisation Suggestions

Sitecore has been offering the ability to create personalised visitor experiences for a long time now, but half the challenge with this has always been knowing what you should personalise and how you should personalise it.

With Sitecore 9.1 you can now direct the results of content tests to be fed into the machine learning server. Sitecore will then analyse the results of the test and if certain segments responded better to one experience over another, if it did then it will suggest that is set up as a personalisation rule.

Content Tag Automation

Search engines and site searches work far better when content has been tagged correctly. However, tagging is a tedious task most content editors would rather do without. Sitecore 9.1 now helps content editors with this task by hooking into the Open Calais API for natural language processing of content-based fields on an item.

Headless Sitecore

At Symposium 2017, Sitecore announced Sitecore JavaScript Services as the first official step into supporting headless setups using Sitecore. Since then this has been available as a preview while the development continued. With Sitecore 9.1 this is now reaching general availability.

The Headless capabilities mean those working with popular frameworks such as Vue, React and Angular can now build rich applications using Sitecore as the backend without needing to write .net code.

Unlike other headless offerings, Sitecore Headless still retains the functionality that makes Sitecore great. Namely, tracking, optimisation, personalisation and there’s even previews in the Sitecore Experience Editor.

And more

These are just 2 of the stand out features coming in Sitecore 9.1, but as well as this there are;

  • Updates to EXM to help avoid spamming recipients while also being able to classify vital emails such as order confirmations to always be sent
  • Enhancements to Sitecore Forms and Marketing Automation that were introduced in Sitecore 9
  • Sitecore Experience Accelerator now supports WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines
  • Preview of Project Horizon, the next version of web content editing
  • Simplification of the installation process with SIF 2.0
How to add a table to content in Sitecore

How to add a table to content in Sitecore

Although most of my blog posts are aimed at developers, this one is really for a content editor. When we build sites and do all the checks to make sure they work well for SEO and hit AAA accessibility standards, it's easy to forget that once we're done the content editors are going to take over with the ability to destroy things :) through the rich text editor.

Scenario

As a content editor you need to display some data in your article, and it makes most sense to put in a table.

Adding a table is actually quite straightforward in Sitecore, it's not much different to doing it in Microsoft Word. You click the insert table button and choose the size you want. However the problem that often gets missed is accessibility. While a table is actually very good for a screen reader, it does need to have a bit of info on things like table headings. e.g. are the they top row, the first column or do they exist at all.

Solution

Adding heading information takes a bit of extra work, but not a lot.

  1. Add you table by clicking the Insert table button and choosing the size you want.

2. Fill in your tables content

3. Right click the table and select "Table Properties"

4. Go to the Accessibility tab and set the heading rows and columns. In this example I have set the first row and first column to be marked as headings.

5. Click on and your table will be updated. If your site has styles for table headings these will also show now too.

6. Switching to HTML view will also show the correct HTML tags now being used.

An alternative approach to this, is at step 1 to pick table wizard rather than picking the size of the table. This will open the same wizard as in step 4 and allow you to specify the size of the table here too.

API Routes stopped working in Sitecore 9

API Routes stopped working in Sitecore 9

We recently undertook a Sitecore 9 upgrade and one issue we encountered was controllers we had set up for API routes stopped working on content delivery servers. Content management and single server setups were unaffected.

Our routes had been set up by the controllers inheriting from SitecoreController and then using the default route which Sitecore would create. e.g. /api/sitecore/foo/getFoo

1public class FooController : SitecoreController
2{
3    ...
4    [System.Web.Http.HttpPost]
5    public ActionResult GetFoo(FooModel queryModel)
6    {
7        ...
8    }
9}

MVC.LegalRoutes

After a bit of investigation we found a new setting in Sitecore 9 called MVC.LegalRoutes. From the documentation:

MVC: Pipe separated list of route URL's that are not valid for use with Sitecore.Mvc.
For instance, the default ASP.NET route ({controller}/{action}/{id}) catches most requests that are actually meant to be handled by the default Sitecore route.
Default: "{controller}/{action}/{id}"

If we added our route to the list everything started to work ok.

1<setting name="Mvc.LegalRoutes" value="|Sitecore.Mvc:sitecore/shell/api/sitecore/{controller}/{action}|Sitecore.Mvc.Api:/api/sitecore/{controller}/{action}|" />

A different approach

Not wanting to just change random settings we stumble across we contacted Sitecore support to see what they thought.

The route 'api/sitecore/{controller}/{action}' is a pre-defined Sitecore SPEAK route for Sitecore Client usage. So when trying to access on a content delivery server where the Sitecore Client is disabled, it no longer works.

So to get around the issue we can start registering the route on content delivery servers through the Global.asax file.

1public override void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs args)
2{
3    base.Application_Start(sender, args);
4

5    if (System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["role:define"] == "ContentDelivery")
6    {
7        System.Web.Routing.RouteTable.Routes.MapRoute("Sitecore.Speak.Commands", "api/sitecore/{controller}/{action}");
8    }
9}
Sitecore SXA example site

Sitecore SXA example site

Recently I've been looking into building sites using Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA). If you haven't heard of it, in short SXA cut's the amount of dev effort by building sites through pre-built re-usable components and then adding some styling. For a brochure type site this can (in some cases) remove virtually all the back end dev. You can read more about it here https://www.sitecore.com/en-gb/products/sitecore-experience-platform/wcm/experience-accelerators

Getting your head around SXA however can be a slight challenge. There is a getting started guide from Sitecore, which covers grid layouts, choosing features etc, but being able to understand how a site should actually be constructed and how the editor will use it can become confusing.

What would really help which Sitecore don't provide is an example site. However Cognifide have and you can download it from Github here: https://github.com/Cognifide/Sitecore.XA.Showcase

To get started with it:

  1. Install a clean copy of Sitecore with SXA
  2. Download the code from github
  3. Restore the NuGet packages
  4. In the App_Config you will see a config file named Sitecore.XA.Project.Showcase.User.config. This includes one setting that needs updating to point to the folder you downloaded the solution to. This is then going to be used by unicorn to synchronize the items.
  5. Publish the solution into your Sitecore install
  6. Login as an admin and go to http://<yourinstancename>/unicorn.aspx
  7. Click the sync button, to synchronize the items
  8. Publish the site

You will now be able to see the showcase site in the admin and have a click through it on the published version.

What's really great about the SXA showcase site is it's a site all about SXA with loads of useful information on how you build an SXA site as well as actually be being built in SXA.