Author: Jason Wilkerson

Jason (@longhorntaco) is a Sitecore Architect and Consultant. From 2016-2023, he had the honor of being selected as a Sitecore Technology MVP, primarily due to his commitment to the Sitecore Community as a speaker, blogger and thought leader. Jason's passions lie deep in architecture and technology. With an unrivaled eye towards quality and elegance, he strives to make every customer's solution the most intuitive and maintainable it can possibly be - not only from a technical standpoint, but also from the user's perspective. With almost two decades of experience building enterprise-class software, as well as leading teams of developers, project managers, business analysts and quality assurance testers, he's been able to assemble an impressive list of successful projects, leaving nothing but satisfied customers behind him. In his free time, Jason is also an avid singer, guitar player and bassist. From a very early age, the same passion that has driven him in technology, has driven his love for music and the honing of his talents. It is this creative outlet, he believes, that provides a unique perspective in the realm of technology. His training and education in computer science provides the foundation for the engineering side of software, but his creative nature serves as the backdrop for creating intuitive, user-centric, customer solutions.

Unlock all SXA datasource items for a given page

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As you may (or may not) know, any given page on a Sitecore site can be made up of content from both the page Item as well as any number of datasource Items stored throughout the content tree. Especially given the component-driven nature of SXA, the content really could be anywhere. This not only enables much of the personalizing power…

Sitecore 9 Forms and AJAX with SXA

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I’m currently working on porting the rbaconsulting.com website over to Sitecore 9 using SXA and one of the new features I’ve been really excited to work with is the new Experience Forms module!  I know that it has…um…a few known issues, but I figured I could work around those.  One requirement I had, which works nicely functions in WFFM (does WFFM do…

xConnect: Searching for Contacts in Sitecore 9

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In previous posts, xConnect was introduced, Contacts were added to xDB and a custom model was deployed. But what about searching for existing contacts? Let’s take a look at a couple of examples! Searching for Multiple Contacts In this example, we’re going to search for any Contacts who have had Interactions recorded in the past 30 days. One particular call…

xConnect: Adding custom facets in Sitecore 9

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The default collection model in xDB comes with many of the fields you would normally need for storing information about a visitor, but there are almost always those special cases where you need to store something very specific to your business that doesn’t come out of the box. As with previous versions of xDB, the collection model is very flexible…

xConnect: Creating Contacts in Sitecore 9

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As discussed in the previous post, the schema for the collection model in xDB changed from earlier versions, making it simpler and more flexible for different types of interactions. Also, the way you connect to xDB to search, add or retrieve data has changed. Now, everything goes through the XConnectClient. Initializing the XConnectClient In this example, I will be creating…

xConnect: Adding interactions in Sitecore 9

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Over the course of the last few posts, we’ve done lots of things with xDB using xConnect! But one thing that hasn’t been covered so far is adding an Interaction to a Contact. Adding an Interaction Let’s take an example of a customer entering your store and purchasing a product. Here’s how you could register that Outcome event in an…

Introducing xConnect for Sitecore 9

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The Experience Database in Sitecore is one of the platforms most differentiating features over its competitors in the Web Content Management System space.  It stores all analytics and interaction data for users across all of your digital properties, whether those users are known or anonymous. From the documentation: The Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) collects all your customer interactions from all…

Interview with MaaakStiles & CatchingExceptions

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A few months ago, when I was attending the Sitecore User Group in Boston, I got a opportunity to sit down and chat with Mark Stiles (@maaakstiles) for his Catching Exceptions interview series. We talked about Sitecore, Texas, authoring books and…Tacos! Check out the interview and find out what a LonghornTaco really is… 😉 hint: it’s not an actual taco……