Introduction: Sitecore Content Serialization(SCS)
Hey Devs!
This article will give you an intro to Sitecore Content Serialization and what are the different tools available for this.
What is Sitecore Content Serialization and why it is needed?
In team all developers works on different components in their local environment. So it is very much required to keep their work in sync.
SCS makes it easy to share, sync and deploy Sitecore items across the team.
Let’s look at an example,
Let say I’m working on Header navigation and other teammate is working on Footer navigation, now in both the case we’ve common use of Link to navigate. So if we both create Link item template then it is duplication and it may create conflict. So it is advisable that one developer creates template for that and Sync it with SCS and other developers can just use it!
It’s just a small case.. SCS has much more power to make things easy for Developers!
What are the tools available for serialization?
There are few tools available for serialization but if you don’t want to use that then you can just create a package of Sitecore items and just share it across the team and they can install that package in their local instance!
But at the end it’ll be very messy and unorganized. Corporates are not following this!
instead you can just use tools listed below:
- TDS (Team Development for Sitecore)
TDS is widely used tool across the developers in projects.
One of the limitation of TDS is that all the developers must use TDS and can not use any other content serialization tool.
Generally developers keeps templates, layouts and renderings in one TDS project and Content items in other projects.
Download TDS from here : TDS Latest
TDS offers some features which are not available in any other tool like code generation, WDP generation etc.
Get More detailed Installation guide and introduction from this article. - Unicorn
Unicorn is based on configuration files which you add in solution. We can define path of items which we wants to serialize in config files.
It automatically serializes child items, we can avoid it by adding configuration to exclude child items.
Unicorn can be added from NuGet package manager in Visual Studio.
Also limitation is same as TDS as all the team members will have to use Unicorn only.
Get more detailed Installation guide and introduction from this article. - Sitecore for Visual Studio
It is a graphical user interface for Sitecore content serialization. It can be seen as improved version of TDS.
It is compatible with Sitecore CLI so developers are free to choose between these two tools.
Download it from here.
Get More detailed Installation guide and introduction from this article. - Sitecore CLI
It is command line based tool to interact with Sitecore instance. It’s very fast and developers can login in CLI and directly interact with Sitecore from there.
Get Installation guide from this article.
Note: Unicorn is opensource but all other tools requires license, however Sitecore provides trial licenses for all of them.
Detailed blog for each of this tools will come soon and will be linked here so stay connected!
