Sitecore Developer Portal

Welcome to the Sitecore Developer Portal repository. This app was created to help you get started with Sitecore. The developer portal aims to bring all the Sitecore developer tools together in one place.

Technology used

The Sitecore developer portal is built with Next.js, Typescript, Chakra UI and Sitecore Blok and is hosted on Vercel. The app uses static site generation to create all the pages at build time. It also utilizes Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) to automatically update the app when changes to page content are made. Much of the page content is written in Markdown and is converted to HTML at build time. Images that are used are managed in Sitecore DAM and are published to a CDN.

Utilities

This repository has some additional tools already setup:

TypeScript for static type checking
ESLint for code linting
Vitest for Unit testing
Playwright for E2E testing
Prettier for code formatting

Prerequisites

Node.js

The developer portal is built with Next.js, so you'll need to have Node.js installed to build the project. You can find the latest version of Node.js here. We recommend using the LTS version of Node.js.

Getting Started

Install Node.js, we recommend the LTS version.
Clone the repository.
Inside the repository run npm install to install all the dependencies.
Create a .env.local file in the root of the project from the .env.template file. The following environment variables should be included:

NEXT_PUBLIC_YOUTUBE_API_KEY=""
NEXT_PUBLIC_COOKIE_CONSENT_URL=

NEXT_PUBLIC_GTM_ID=
NEXT_PUBLIC_GTM_AUTH=
NEXT_PUBLIC_GTM_ENVIRONMENT=

NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_APP_API_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_APP_CUSTOMER_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_APP_ENV=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_ENABLE_PREVIEW_SEARCH=

NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_CLIENT_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_TARGETURL=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_COOKIE_DOMAIN=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_POS=

(For more information on populating environment variables see section Environment Variables above.)

Run npm run dev to start the development server.
Open the http://localhost:3000 in your browser to see the result!

Environment Variables

The Sitecore developer portal incorporates a number of third party services to bring in content. For full functionality, you must create a .env.local file in the root of the project and add in the below environment variables. Use the .env.template file as a starting point.

The following variables should exist within the .env.local file:

NEXT_PUBLIC_PUBLIC_URL=
NEXT_PUBLIC_YOUTUBE_API_KEY="An API key with YouTube Data API v3 access enabled"
NEXT_PUBLIC_COOKIE_CONSENT_URL=
NEXT_PUBLIC_GTM_ID=
NEXT_PUBLIC_GTM_AUTH=
NEXT_PUBLIC_GTM_ENVIRONMENT=

Note: The site will still function without the above keys. The components that require these environment variables will fail gracefully and not display on the pages.

Sitecore CDP/Personalize

To enable Sitecore CDP/Personalize to capture events the following environment variables are required:

NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_CLIENT_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_TARGETURL=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_COOKIE_DOMAIN=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITECORE_CDP_POS=

Note: The site will still function if the keys are missing or left blank.

Sitecore Search

To enable search the following environment variables (first three) are required:

NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_APP_API_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_APP_CUSTOMER_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_APP_ENV=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SEARCH_ENABLE_PREVIEW_SEARCH=

Note: The site will still function if the keys are missing or left blank. However these keys are still required to build the application

CEC configuration

The account that will be used must have an initial configuration that needs to be made on CEC:

Sources

Information sources must be entered and processed in CEC, to populate the content catalog.

Suggestion Blocks

Suggestions blocks must have a field named name_suggester (this needs to be configured for the preview search widget). The following picture shows a sample configuration:

Sorting options

Sorting options must include suggested criteria pre-configured. You can provide display name as per your requirements. The picture shows how it should look on CEC:

Remember to reindex the relevant sources after configuring a new sorting option.

Pre configured widgets

The account must have the following widgets created before:

Name	ID	Type	Description	Used in
[Search Results Page] Search Results	`rfkid_7`	`Search Results`	Search results widget. Will include a grid with the results together with the avility to filter results by different facets.	Search Results Page (`/search`)
Preview Search	`rfkid_6`	`Preview Search`	It is an input that does a quick search over the content. It is included on the page header.	Every page

Contributions

We are very grateful to the community for contributing bug fixes and improvements. We welcome all efforts to evolve and improve the Sitecore Developer Portal; read below to learn how to participate in those efforts.

Code of Conduct

Sitecore has adopted a Code of Conduct that we expect project participants to adhere to. Please read the full text so that you can understand what actions will and will not be tolerated.

Contributing Guide

If you want to make changes to the code, follow these steps:

Fork the Developer Portal Repo GitHub repo.
Clone the forked repo to your local machine.
Create a feature branch from main for your changes. e.g. git checkout -b my-feature-branch
npm install
npm run dev (to preview your changes locally)
Make your changes (if you changes include images please use the public/images folder to store the image(s))
1. For more information on how to add content visit the contribute page
Commit, push to your remote fork of the Developer Portal repo, then open a pull request (PR) to the main branch of the Developer Portal repo.

Your changes will be reviewed and merged if appropriate.

Sitecore/developer-portal