Sitecore Helix is the recommended practices and guidelines for Sitecore Development.
Sitecore Commerce is a native integrated Commerce Engine to the Sitecore Experience Platform and development extends the Sitecore Helix guidelines in some areas.
With Helix we cover guidance on a wide range of development practices – all in a Sitecore context.
Helix is really us listening to the partner and development community. For Sitecore to not only deliver a very flexible product & framework, but to also publish official guidelines and recommended practices for Sitecore development. Aimed at assisting partners and developers in optimizing development productivity over the full end-to-end application lifecycle.
Helix was announced at the Sitecore Symposium in New Orleans, September 2016. It is a transparent initiative and is based on years of community input and experience in building Sitecore solutions. We want Helix to evolve with the help of the community. With the help from the development and partner community.
In order to understand what Helix is, lets start with terminology, specifically four terms which helps you understand the concept and scope of Helix. What it is and what it isn’t.
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First of all we have principles, principles tells you why it is important to do things a certain way. What the purpose is.
Helix is based on the principles of package design, so these are the fundamental core part of Helix.
These principles are the reason for all the conventions and guidelines
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The conventions and guidelines tells you how to realize these.
In other words, Helix is a set of Conventions, Principles or Guidelines that describes the application of software design principles applied to a Sitecore project
Secures implementations in a future proof way by architecting the implementation as maintainable and extensible business-centric modules
Recommendations for making your Sitecore implementation as easy to build, test, extend and maintain as possible.
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Examples
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Tools
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Guidelines
Documentation online
Initially there was some confusion about the purpose of Habitat from our side, and therefore we have split up the principles and conventions from the actual example code. This is why we today have Helix and Habitat.
Habitat is merely an EXAMPLE of Helix It is not an ACCELERATOR KIT
Helix is the what, Habitat shows you an example of how.
Be inspired by the implementations in Habitat, understand them before copying and adjusting – See it as an example, not a framework.
-> Some Foundation modules can be copied as they are and should be separated, discussion for a later session.
Sitecore Demo sites
They do use Habitat as an ACCELERATOR KIT
Just EXAMPLES, just like Habitat– Thats why they are called DEMO.
Objects are divided by their type.
A module in Sitecore contains EVERYTHING that is related to the module’s responsibility – to the feature that it is responsible for.
Introducing Sitecore commerce.
An opportunity to add additional complexity to your spaghetti.
Sitecore is the only cloud-enabled software platform that enables marketers and merchandisers to fully personalize the end-to-end shopping experience. Sitecore Commerce is about lifting the experience from products to brand and create a truly personalised experience for the consumer.
Sitecore Commerce is an organic, integrated part of the Sitecore Experience Platform. It is a single platform offering content management, merchandising, personalization, optimization and much more for marketers and merchandisers.
But lets look behind the covers and what the Sitecore Experience and Commerce platform consists of.
Commerce adds a number of funtionalities and types to be considered
So this means we are focused on splitting the commerce types up across the features which needs them.