Using SXA for XM Cloud development
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) is designed to help you:
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Speed up the creation and setup of websites in XM Cloud.
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Define a structure and common patterns for your websites to facilitate multisite setup, content sharing, and content reusability.
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Set up multilingual websites that are identical in terms of structure, versioning, and naming of items.
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Ensure a consistent web design within or across the sites in your environment.
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Enable developers to build custom components to be rendered on your websites.
Site management
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Create and manage headless sites.
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Organize your sites in site collections. Adding sites to a site collection lets you share content, components, and layout elements between the sites within the site collection.
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Create site templates for the XM Cloud dashboard to let users create websites with no programming involved. SXA comes out-of-the box with two site templates: Empty and Basic site.
Content reuse
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Use data sources with your components to reuse content across sites and pages.
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Enable sharing of content and layout elements between the sites in a site collection.
Templates
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Create and extend data templates to base new content items on, for example pages.
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Define standard values for specific sites to set default field values, settings, and insert options for a data template.
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Create page branches as a method to utilize page templates with prepopulated, modifiable text for content authors.
Components
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Create your own custom components, or use prebuilt components in the Pages and Experience Editor apps.
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Create variants for your components to accommodate different usage scenarios.
Layout and page design
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Build your own reusable page design elements to give the pages of your website a consistent design and information architecture.
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Configure your sites to use the Bootstrap 5 or Tailwind grid systems, or set up a custom grid system.
SEO and searching
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Redirect URLs or create redirect maps to lead website visitors to relevant content when they have requested a page that no longer exists.
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Configure sitemaps to help search engines index the pages of your website.
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Configure robots.txt files to tell web crawlers what content to index and what not.
Other tasks
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Use the SXA PowerShell scripts to automate common tasks.
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Configure how SXA-functionality works in Pages and the Experience Editor, for example, the devices available in Pages to simulate what pages look like to website visitors.