Sitecore Development Services With Sitecore Helix

As Sitecore implementations differ from one company to another depending upon their industry and market trends hence, the goal of this article is to provide you required information about Sitecore helix like why is it so important for developers?, why you should choose Sitecore helix ?, what benefits it offers to customers? etc. Let’s first understand what exactly Sitecore helix means?

Helix is a set of comprehensive design principles and conventions for Sitecore development. Helix was mainly developed by Sitecore itself and according to Sitecore it is recommended best practice for Sitecore development. Habitat is a factual Sitecore project implemented on the Sitecore experience platform using helix. The main aim of Sitecore helix is to organize and lower decencies, which ultimately make your Sitecore project as simple and easy to create, test, extend and maintain as possible.

However, the aim of helix is not re-use but supportability as well as maintainability. Using Sitecore helix, your site would be uncomplicated to maintain or bring in new developers as it follows a typical and standard architecture. Sitecore helix contains specific and concrete conventions for how visual studio projects are to be managed and organized. Another important benefit that Sitecore helix offers is that there will be no more guessing or assuming about where the code should go as Sitecore helix does it all for you and spells everything out very evidently and clearly. With sitecore helix you need not worry about rigid or monolithic projects. Sitecore helix will successfully keep all the solutions clean and keep all the decencies organized and managed properly.

Why Choose Sitecore Helix?

There are plenty of reasons why you should choose Sitecore helix for your business some of them are listed below.

It provides a simple, straightforward and consistent architecture.

You can create, edit and manage almost everything whenever you want as it provides you complete flexibility in terms of changes you want in your solution.

You can add new and latest features very easily without a steep learning curve.

It is considered as Sitecore PowerShell and leverage complete power of Sitecore .

Helix principles focus to work on the structured approach in order to result in controlled (less) dependencies and low coupling.

The underlying architecture for Sitecore helix is termed as component based architecture or modular architecture.

Sitecore helix also delivers an excellent basis on which you can develop additional modules and extend existing ones.

How Sitecore Helix A Boon For Developers?

Some of the main reasons why is it a boon for developers include –

Sitecore helix controls dependencies. It helps in managing Sitecore items.

Implementation will be more stable as with Sitecore helix delayed deployments and abandoned marketing projects can be avoided.

Sitecore helix saves the developers time and efforts because he no longer has to create any additional or existing module from scratch.

Implementation will be easier to maintain which means that developers have to spend less time fixing bugs and more time on implementing new and advanced features.

It provides domain language and culture support which is completely unique in the industry.

Easily use component across your website.

The purpose of Sitecore helix is to assure Sitecore implementations in a future-proof way by architecting them as maintainable and expansible business-centric modules.

Sitecore helix also provide Sitecore development process recommendations to make it as simple and speedy as possible to build, test, extend, and maintain Sitecore implementations.

What Does Sitecore Helix Offer To Its Customers?

Sitecore helix provides better quality solution to its customers coupled with advanced technology and current market trends.

Sitecore helix provides better and high quality Sitecore implementations where you can avoid dead ends projects.

It also delivers long term business value where it becomes easy to extend, change and upgrade whenever a change is required.

It delivers faster time to market compared to typical or standard CMS solutions. It decreases the time to go to market because of the presence of common modules.

It enhances your long term business values and helps you to achieve your short term business objectives more efficiently and effectively. In short, Sitecore helix is all about organizing features and components in folders.

Additionally, Sitecore support will make sure to assist you in solving the issues more quickly and easily as they very well understand Sitecore helix conventions.

The architecture principles and conventions of Sitecore helix aims largely on macro architecture which means it highly emphasizes on putting the entire solution together for an uplifted productivity, quality and longevity.

Breaking Down A Website Into Helix Layers

Here we will discuss 3 main helix layers that helix takes a focus on while breaking down a website –

Project Layer

The project layer is considered as the composer and brings it all together. It mainly provides the context for your solution. The layer contains everything that is important for pulling a website together. It contains page types as well as content types that bring multiple features together to build a page on the website. The website project in visual studio contains base layouts, CSS, structural JavaScript. Project layer is unstable and flexible as the code is changing on a day to day basis and is concrete as there will be very less to absolutely no abstraction. Whenever there is any change in a feature say, a new one is added or one is deleted or removed then every little change will reflect clearly in this project layer.

Foundation Layer

Foundation layer is the layer where the reusable functional code exists to support features. Foundation layer does not contain any views or renderings as well as does not refer to any feature or project modules. Unlike project layer and feature layer, foundation layer is the most stable layer in the solution as in this layer the code does not change very frequently. However, change in foundation module can impact many other modules in a solution. A foundation module will not be specific to a single module in the solution. The main motives of foundation layer are –

Sitecore code, base templates, helpers module

Solution wide modules such as wffm

Shared code used by two or more feature modules

Feature Layer

Feature layer is a layer where all the functions of a website are created. In this layer you define your interface templates such as fields for content entry, your cshtml files and controllers as well as models. It represents the actual features of your website. There will be multiple projects each project is responsible for a single objective in the business domain for example, feature. blog will be responsible for blogs, feature.news will be held responsible for news, feature.account will be responsible for account and more. Here in feature layers you don’t create separate projects exclusively for top level navigation as well as for sub navigation. Everything will be in a single navigation project under feature layer. Feature layer is more flexible as here also the code changes very frequently on a day to day basis and is also concrete as it uses controllers, models and views to render a module. It uses interfaces/abstractions /services from the foundation layers which we will be discussing in sometime.

Mistakes You Should Avoid In Feature Layer

Mistake 1:

do not make feature projects like searchbox, searchr esult etc. Instead of creating multiple feature projects you can focus on creating a single project for search like feature.search which will be responsible for search.

Mistake 2:

name of the feature projects should be technology specific like never name a project as feature.solarsearch as the feature projects shall be named after applying enough logic and must represent the context.

Mistake 3:

generic modules like utilities or helpers mostly indicate that the module is loaded with multiple responsibilities.

Ready To Get Started

Biztechnosys is a certified and experienced Sitecore service provider. Our team of professional Sitecore CMS developers has multiple Sitecore projects handling experience for both small as well as mid-sized firms. We are one of the leading Sitecore helix service provides in the industry. With the help of Sitecore helix we can keep all your solutions clean and keep all the decencies organized for you. We can provide you a solution that will improve the efficiency of your projects and reduce costs and time to market. Our team of Sitecore experts can deliver better guidance on how to update and upgrade your system when new and latest versions or products are released. You can contact our team of professional Sitecore developers who can guide you on what kind of solution fits best to your business organization based on your business requirements