The Tech Stack That goes Well with Sitecore XM Cloud

Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud is a cloud-native modern CMS that enables brands to create, manage, and deliver content to customers at a more rapid pace.

XM cloud is the outcome of Sitecore’s transition from its primary on-premise content management solution to a modern cloud-based architecture.

One of the more rewarding aspects of Sitecore’s new XM Cloud is its headless CMS enabling the distribution of content across a wide range of interfaces, devices, and channels.

Sitecore Headless Services has two primary aspects for accessing data: Layout Service & GraphQL.

The Layout Service allows sophisticated pages created by authors using Experience Editor (basically infinite possibilities) to be returned in a headless format.

GraphQL on the other hand allows for content to be queried at a more granular level (i.e., 5 press releases, tagged with 'investment') in a headless format.

Marketers, in particular, have long been craving a platform that can enable them to be agile and adaptable while trying to meet diverse kinds of customer expectations.

With the introduction of XM Cloud, Sitecore has now ensured that catering to customer experience becomes hassle-free allowing businesses to streamline their focus on simply providing great digital experiences.

Organizations that choose to adapt to the latest Sitecore XM cloud will benefit in the following ways:

• Swift Innovation & Updates
• Elastic Scaling
• Composability
• Adaptable Engagement
• Multichannel Content Management
• Multi-site Management
• DevOps Tools
• Cloud Portal

Tech Stack

XM Cloud supports any deployment model and customers are free to build and host with any front-end technology of their choice as long as that is supported by JSS.

The following discussion relates to the SaaS version of Vercel offering from Sitecore, which is built on the Next.js web development framework.

If React is a library for building components, Next.js is the framework that provides everything else needed to build web applications with React (routing, bundling, server-side rendering, etc.).

Next.js has certain functions that are critical to XM Cloud, which includes static-site generation (SSG), server-side rendering (SSR), and special lifecycle methods that support data fetching.

Next.js is critical for the successful building and development on XM Cloud, and along with React, serves as an essential learning point for all developers.

Just like with React, you don’t quite need to know every single detail and instead focus mostly on data fetching methods that include getServerSideProp, getStaticPaths, and getStaticProp.

Experience Edge

Sitecore Experience Edge is an API-based service that provides scalable access to Sitecore Experience Platform outlets, media, and layout. Sitecore itself has spoken about the inclusion of Experience Edge as part of the XM Cloud stack.

Experience Edge has better performance and an interactive proxy layer to access your published content. It's what you can publish your headless content to.

Your frontend delivery server will query Experience Edge directly. It can respond to GraphQL queries and cache Layout Service (from the Sitecore Headless Services).

Currently, you can build websites leveraging Sitecore Headless Services without Experience Edge, but it sure seems like Experience Edge will remain a core part of the new XM Cloud stack as well.

Conclusion

The cloud-based nature of Sitecore XM Cloud is certainly guaranteed to provide a range of affordances for businesses that were previously missing. Get in touch with our team for your Sitecore queries.