An Introduction to Sitecore

A tech stack for building website builders

Sitecore is a software technology that has been around for a number of years for building content-heavy, large-scale websites. In essence it is a software for building a custom enterprise size website builder. It has been used heavily in the enterprise world, especially by Visual Studio and ASP .NET developers, because of its connection to Microsoft. Though the Sitecore software itself is still bound to the windows environment, the company has begun developing JS compatibility tooling like JSS around their product to allow JS developers as well to develop on top of the platform.

The Sitecore team was one of the first teams to coin the term headless CMS architecture. The concept of a headless CMS is that you should only need to author content once, and then you should be able to use that content in a variety of places. Sitecore is a headless CMS on steroids, hijacking every request to your website and routing it through the CMS, thus allowing content editors to rearrange and reference chunks of your code within the editor. In this way, content editors can build whole pages, routes, or even entire websites themselves just using the website’s backend content editor.

Fundamentally, Sitecore is a web server with accompanying databases that serves as the entrypoint for every new…