Over the past month or so, I have had the opportunity to work with some fine talent here at Perficient who are showing me the ropes on the Sitecore Ignition Development Accelerator as well as how this framework adheres to the Helix patterns, principles, and conventions. Helix is a growing passion of mine, along with our development team, and the more I develop using these patterns, principles, and conventions along with the Sitecore Ignition development accelerator, I am quickly seeing the benefits of Helix & Sitecore Ignition as a great development practice.

Helix gives me the ability to maintain enterprise level Sitecore solutions a lot more easily with the Project, Feature, Foundation approach as well as SOLID patterns, principles, and conventions behind the reason why you should develop in this manner. If you have not started development with Helix, truly consider a shift toward this as it is now considered a best practice, and recommended by Sitecore at this point.

The Ignition framework allows me to hit the quick-start button when starting a new project for a new client, but in addition it allows me to work with Helix patterns, principles, and conventions to accelerate development time. There is more than meets the eyes with the Sitecore Ignition framework, and I felt it best to share my findings now that I have some hands-on experience in both areas.

I started out speaking with Jon Upchurch, major contributor to the Ignition team, who gave me a handful of links to “Ignite the Helix”, those of which are below:

GitHub repo for Ignition: https://github.com/sitecoreignition/SitecoreIgnition

Sitecore Ignition Documentation: http://sitecoreignition.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Getting Started with Sitecore Ignition (Initial Items & Project Template for VS): https://github.com/sitecoreignition/Ignition.Foundation/wiki

Getting Started with Sitecore Ignition (10 Minute Video): http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/06/sitecore-ignition-getting-started/

Getting Started with Sitecore Ignition 2.0 (50 Minute Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX4sAcQFqGM

Webinar on Sitecore Ignition:http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/06/sitecore-ignition-a-webinar-overview/

Sitecore Ignition 101 Blog Post by George Chang: http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/06/sitecore-ignition-101-overview/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Sitecore-Ignition-1714108435506468/

Twitter Ignition Team: @ignition_sc

The links above will help you to learn more about the Sitecore Ignition accelerator as well as stay informed via your social media favorites Facebook & Twitter.

Initial setup of Sitecore Ignition is not very hard at all if you are following the directions in documentation and videos, and rather than go through the setup in this post, my focus is really on the benefits of why you should consider using the Sitecore Ignition development accelerator for your Helix based Sitecore projects. Below, are a few benefits in relation to Helix that will speed up your Helix initiatives:

• Ease of setup to initially get started to add into your Helix based Sitecore solution
• A Visual Studio Sitecore Ignition project template
  • When you add a new “Feature” project, which could be many, then this ability alone to have a template will speed things up dramatically in your daily development.
  • Sitecore Ignition project template comes pre-loaded with a Controllers, ViewModels, and Views folder for you to start creating your modules and get to work quickly.
  • Pre-configured Unicorn predicates for the project setup in the App_Config/Include folder.
  • When using symbolic links with Link Shell Extensions, then you won’t even have to set up the serialization folder for the project because Unicorn will place the serialized items in the right spots in your feature to be included for check-in to your repo. Brilliant!
• Ignition.Foundation.Core includes SimpleInjector for IoC, and Glass.Mapper as the ORM. So when you create the new project, all you need to do is reference Sitecore.Kernel.dll & Sitecore.Mvc.dll from the official NuGet feed for Sitecore. This will make Glass.Mapper happy during Ignition.Foundation.Core package installation. Once the Sitecore Ignition.Foundation.Core NuGet package is installed, your project is ready to go!

Below are some benefits I have run into in a short period of time using the Sitecore Ignition framework:

• No Global.asax or RouteConfig.cs you need to worry about in the solution. Which is just less files/folders you need to worry about and more clean in my opinion, which is always good. When doing AJAX work you simply need to setup on your JSON returning methods for them to use [PublicRoute] along with [HttpPost] and that’s it. The rest is done behind the scenes for routing. Pretty slick!
• Experience Editor friendly just met developer friendly when the Sitecore Ignition team created a way for you to simply name a .cshtml file with a certain naming convention i.e. “_EE”, and now that view is automatically Experience Editor friendly. Big win for teams with juniors!
• Dynamic placeholders are OOTB with this accelerator so there is no need to roll your own, download one off the Sitecore Marketplace, or pull one in from NuGet.

Overall, I am very excited about working with Helix patterns, principles, and conventions now in my every day Sitecore development role as well as the ability to accelerate that development with the use of Sitecore Ignition. Thanks for the hard work Sitecore Ignition team!

I have a good feeling that I will be working with the contribution team when I can to help make this accelerator even better than it already is for the Sitecore community. Looking forward to when that time  comes. Now go and “Ignite the Helix”!