The Copernicus Moment and Sitecore Content Hub

For those who don't know who Copernicus, he is the one whom came up with the controversial manuscript stating that the planets revolved around the sun and not the earth. People had these very complex diagrams on this worked but once people believed the true science then everything became simpler.  This controversy was more intense then the SiteCore vs Sitecore debate.

Now let's look at Sitecore.  Consensus in the community is Sitecore is the center of the content manager's solar system however with the introduction of Sitecore Content Hub this changes. Content Hub is now the center of the solar system.  What? But content editors live in Sitecore.  Well not exactly. Just like the scientists in Copernicus' time they worked in other systems but pretended for the techies creating the solutions that Sitecore was the center.  Marketers worked in Adobe InDesign, Hootsuite, WordPress, blogs, and a myriad of other tools.

By placing Sitecore Content Hub in the center that means the marketing manager can create the project for their campaign, they can create tasks for all parts of the campaign which may include:

• Creation of assets
• Creation of all content (blogs, sitecore content, online and physical ads, flyers and posters, etc)
• Obtaining rights to content and/or assets.
• Edit assets and content.
• Approve assets and content.
• Publish the assets and content
• Keep track of the project and determine how a delay will affect the campaign delivery.

Now as a content editor you can still go to InDesign or Sitecore or other applications and use the content. You can still use your placeholders and personalize like you did before.  You don't lose any of that.  What you gain is efficiency.  Rather than switching systems to create, approve and publish content and/or assets you go to one system and see the whole picture. As an added bonus, having all the assets in one spot there is less chance that someone is using the wrong version or is unaware of the new version.  Rather than searching through emails and file shares for the latest version of an asset you can go right Content Hub and search for it.  

This is a Copernicus Moment for the Sitecore Community. Some will rebel I am sure but in general this is a big plus for marketers that need all the time they can get for marketing campaigns as they are way behind and working evening and weekends to get it done.  

If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me. I will be at Sitecore Symposium. I arrive on Sunday and don't leave until Saturday. I am happy to chat in person about this. If you have trouble finding me drop by the EPAM Systems booth and ask for Chris Williams.

Choose Unique And Multi-value Wisely When Adding Option List as property to a Schema

When building all the schema you will determine the properties as best you can but will want to add or change schema later.  In some cases that is cool but in other cases changing the schema can be a challenge.  One such time is when working with option list properties. In the screenshot below I have highlighted 2 properties: Unique and Multi-value. Once you set these values and save them you cannot edit them.

This is new member

Note that after save we go to edit and see this. Note you cannot edit.  This is by design because as a developer you know the implications of changing these once you have data in these fields.

So be careful when choosing the options. Now there is a way to fix it afterwards but not a nice one  The way to fix it is to create a new property with the proper settings then use script to migrate the data to the new property, flagging any with possible issues for manual fixing later. 

If you have more of these please let us know and we can add them.

Integrating with Sitecore Content Hub

There are 2 sets of APIs you can use to integrate with Sitecore Content Hub:

1. REST API: These APIs allow you to use Standard GET, POST, PUT and they return JSON. Well that is the high level description of them. You can find more in the REST API documentation. We have also created a simple .NET Core Console application called SchBasicCoreConsole which provides a sample of some of the API calls to get you started. You can find the source code as well as the binary in the SchGuild Git repository.   
2. WebClient SDK: To use the WebClient SDK you require the Nuget packages for it. These are available via MyGet. This article explains how to get the packages. You can find out more in the WebClient SDK documentation. We have created a simple .NET Core Console application which will be available soon. It provides a sample of calling the WebClient SDK to perform some tasks. 

Out of the 2 options we highly recommend using the WebClient SDK for a couple reasons. The first being that WebClient SDK handles a lot of the package formatting which can be error prone. The second being that the Script SDK which is used within Sitecore Content Hub itself uses the same object model so most of the code you do for WebClient SDK can be repurposed for Script SDK.

Any MVP will tell you that the best way to figure out how something works is to decompile the DLL and take a look. In the era of Web-based solution, Fiddler is the equivalent . If the API is not mentioned in the documentation or you need access to the actual JSON response rather than the object model, then the WebClient SDK has the Raw method. This method will pass the proper token for you and allow you to do a raw GET, POST, PUT, DELETE asynchronously. It will not pass in all the headers for you but it is quite useful. You can read more in the IRawClient documetation. For an example of how to use it for POST download the SchWebClientCoreConsole from GitHub and look at the GetAllScriptsAsJson method of the WebClientContext class.

If you have any questions about Sitecore Content Hub feel free to email me. Also if you have access to Sitecore Content Hub and want to help us extend these examples or work on some other open source initiatives we have planned then reach out and we can collaborate so everyone can benefit from this on their first integration. You can email me at christopher_williams@epam.com

If you are going to Sitecore Symposium then you will see Jose Dominguez, Brent Pinkstaff and I wearing a "You Had Me At Metadata" t-shirt. Stop us and say hi.