SITECORE EXPERIENCE EDITOR

Table Of Contents

• What is Sitecore Experience Editor?
• Advantages of using Experience Editor.
• Prerequisite knowledge before using Experience Editor.
• Introduction of Editor toolbar.
• Creating New page from Editor.
• Navigating to other page.
• Versioning and Multi-Lingual Page
• Publishing Settings and Publish from Editor.
• Validation.
• Other toolbox buttons like “Aliases”, “Workbox”, “View Tab” etc
• Toolbar customization

What is Sitecore Experience Editor?

The Experience Editor, Sitecore’s on-page editing tool, gives content authors and marketers the ability to update multiple components and content items in a single place. This is made possible because of Sitecore’s powerful component architecture.

In the Experience Editor, the ribbon with all the available functionality is displayed at the top of the webpage. The functionality on the ribbon varies depending on your security roles and the customizations of the website that you are accessing.

Advantages of using Experience Editor

Reduce time to Market

With Sitecore’s Experience Editor, productivity is greatly increased as you do not have to search through a vast Content Tree to find the content you want to edit, you simply go to the page and make your edits right on the page. Once your changes are done, you can save and publish them to make them visible to the public. 

Inline Editing

The Experience Editor is a WYSIWYG platform for editing your Sitecore websites content. Content authors can add content on the fly directly inline since everything is visually seen on the page. This allows content authors to bypass the copy and paste process from a word document and see results right away.

Confidence and Accuracy

The content author gives you the ability to see an entire page layout, modules, and content all at once. This gives the content author confidence in what their creating and easily accessible to review before publishing to the web.

Component Rendering

The Experience Editor allows content authors to easily add/remove modules, move modules up and down a page, set personalization, add metadata, and start workflow all from one screen. In older versions the content author would have to manually assign rendering placeholders using the presentation details (layout of the page) which was always a challenge if you were not familiar with the placeholders or renderings.

Personalization

The Experience Editor is also where many of the personalization features or the customer experiences are crafted and maintained. Marketers can simulate visits and see how their personalization rules impact content and the user experience before deploying them.

Prerequisite knowledge before using Experience Editor

• Basics of Sitecore item, fields, template
• What is Page, Renderings, layouts? Types of renderings. How to create layouts, renderings in sitecore etc.
• Final and shared layout
• What is Placeholders?
• DataSources
• Versioning
• Language version
• Alises
• Different types of Publishing
• Publishing targets
• Workflow & Workbox
• Validations

Introduction of Editor toolbar.

Creating New page from Editor

To insert a new page from experience editor. User need to click on the below hi-lighted button “Insert Page”. Then a popup will appear to choose the available template options.

Note: Its mandatory to choose valid page template and proper name of the page. However you can change the name and template from content editor if required.

 

Navigating to other page

To Enable Navigation bar / Breadcrumb content editor first have to enable the setting from “View” Tab and “Navigation Bar”. By clicking on arrow it will list down the available item of one step parent or child. After selecting that item click on “Go” button to navigate to the page. By clicking on “Edit” button user can edit the page.

Versioning and Multi-Lingual Page

Versioning is very important feature while dealing with content editing and content authoring. From Experience Editor user can maintain multiple versions of single page. As all of you may know that shared field values are same across all versions and all languages. So versioning of a page will applied for non-shared fields only.

Publishing Settings and Publish from Editor

Publish Settings helps you to set the datetime range to make the item publishable. You can set for every item versions of current language or for every item version in every language. However from “Targets” tab you can restrict the publishing targets as well, this applies to every item version in every language.

Validation

Validation played an important role to cross check the user inputs, for any human mistake during content editing it validates the field value and show results in grid view. Content editor reviews and corrected the error. Its one of the best practices to validate the page before publish.

Other toolbox buttons like “Aliases”, “Workbox”, “View Tab” etc

Aliases

This will prompt a popup to list other URLs which can point to the same page. E.g Contact-Us page can be accessible as “reach-us” or “write-us” etc as per business requirement.

Workbox

Quickly show a categorized list view of all the items present in different workflow stages and user can quickly take action from here.

View Tab

This tab holds different checkbox settings, to enable and disable different options of content editor.

Toolbar customization

Experience Editor toolbar Ribbon can easily be customized and as per requirement developer can inject custom logics by pipeline customization.