5 Ways to Learn Sitecore Development

Even though Sitecore Symposium was 3 weeks ago I'm still processing the experience and the takeaways I got from the event, every year is always different in this regard. One of the things that struck me this year was the broad levels of experience within the development community. Many of us have been doing this for over 10 years, some of us 15+ but as the platform continues to grow and thrive there's a whole wave of developers relatively new to the platform coming through. Which basically inspired this back to basics guide on what I find to be the best ways to grow your Sitecore development skills. If you're getting started or looking to upgrade those skills, I hope this helps!

1. Learn from Sitecore

So basically Sitecore is built on Sitecore, which means chances are the customisation/extension that you are trying to build already has solid examples in terms of technical approach and best practices that Sitecore are using themselves. This is true of:

• Pipelines
• Event handlers
• Scheduled tasks
• DI patterns
• Ribbon buttons
• Workflow actions
• Patch config files
• Rules engine conditions and actions

This is certainly not an exhaustive list and of course this means that a decompiler is your friend. Planning on extending a pipeline with a custom processor? Take a look at an existing processor in the pipeline, what is it doing? What is it NOT doing? What kind of properties are available on the pipeline args?

2. Patch All The Things

Or to put it another way, know what you changed and have an easy way to turn it off if you need to. It can't be stressed enough that any modifications you make to Sitecore should be applied to Sitecore using patch files. This has huge benefits in terms of troubleshooting, change control, environment specific transforms, transparency, upgrades and so on. There are plenty of resources out there that break down Sitecore's patching syntax. Why is this about learning Sitecore development? Because starting off with best practices is a lot easier than 'un-learning' bad practices and modifying Sitecore's configuration files directly is up there with worst of bad practices.

3. Master Sitecore YouTube Channel

We all learn in different ways, some people are visual, some prefer to read and of course some prefer to digest video content. There are so many great ways to consume Sitecore training materials in video format including:

• The Sitecore Virtual User Group Conference
• Live streams of user groups from all over the globe
• Sitecore's official YouTube channel

I single out Master Sitecore because it seems increasingly that video content from other sources is being aggregated on this channel, for example live recordings from this years SUGCON in Berlin. I highly recommend you check out some of the material on here as it's contributed from a wide range of sources in the community.

4. Sitecore Documentation

Ok, this might seem like an obvious thing to mention BUT Sitecore have come on leaps and bounds in the last few years in the quality of the documentation they provide and we all acknowledge the awesome work being done by Martina Welander to make documentation a first class citizen at Sitecore. What's interesting is that as well as the general documentation that's available on doc.sitecore.net there are 'documentation portals' for specialised subjects such as:

• Helix
• Data Exchange Framework
• Data Architecture

And the information provided in those is definately well worth a read. We have also recently had the promise from Sitecore that the move to two releases a year means that every release will be a 'complete' release, which includes full documentation.

One other thing to pay some attention to from a documentation perspective is the release notes on dev.sitecore.net for the core CMS and optional modules, this in combination with the known issues sections can provide some much needed insight to what you can expect from the platform.

5. The Sitecore Community!

Last but by no means least, if you haven't noticed already Sitecore has an incredible network of community contributors all over the globe on various channels:

• Individual blogs
• Sitecore Stack Exchange
• Twitter (#Sitecore, #SitecoreUG, #SitecoreSym, #SitecoreMVP...)
• Open source projects
• Slack
• User groups
• Conferences

The insights being shared by the community are invaluable, get involved! One way I found to get involved in the community initially was to think of parts of Sitecore that I wanted to learn more about and build a small module that does something useful and uses those parts of the platform... and then.. well, share it. It's a good confidence booster, which can also launch you into things like speaking at user groups. The community is always looking to hear from new speakers (as well as the familiar faces).

Happy Sitecore... ing.