On Being a Sitecore MVP for a Decade

Today Sitecore announced the 2021 Sitecore MVPs. I'm honored yet again to be included. This year is especially important, as it marks my 10th year as a Sitecore MVP. I figured I would use this as an opportunity to reflect on the last 10 years.

Back in the early days, I approached Sitecore as a black box, and spent a lot of time unpacking it to understand how it worked. I leveraged the community's questions on Stack Overflow as fodder to give me direction on where to dig, both to learn on my own and help out community members as a nice byproduct. Turns out, this turned into a good old fashioned gold rush, with many other members flocking to Stack Overflow to both ask questions and provide great answers. At one point I was the top Sitecore answerer, however the community has continued to thrive and even spiked out into a dedicated Sitecore Stack Exchange space. Apparently, my most popular answer to a Sitecore Stack Overflow question was about Sitecore from a developer's perspective. Go figure.

Speaking of developer experience, Sitecore has been known as having a bit of a learning curve to pick up, which brings me to training. I remember my first official instructor-led training on 5.3 in 2008. It was an intimate setting of three developers and our trainer. Of all the things I remember from that training, the lasting phrase burned into my memory to this day is: "remember the green dot!" For those of you old-timers that may recall, the green dot was a small implementation to allow for in-context page editing (WebEdit mode) by authors to create sub-items - which used to be called "masters" (pre-cursor to insert options).

Looking back at the most popular content I've written about Sitecore, it appears fundamentals of the content authoring experience is really what interests people. To me, that makes sense. The platform is intended to make the life of a content author and publisher easier. Getting the basics of a nice authoring experience down will reduce friction of using the system to create and publish. It's the whole point -- manage content through an elegant experience.

My top 3 posts based on analytics:

1. Tame Your Sitecore Treelists - keep those selection lists tight
2. Sitecore Rendering Datasource Locations - take advantage of tiered data sources and content reuse (this is one of my favorites!)
3. Sitecore Items Will Not Publish - understand out of the box workflow/publishing restrictions

I'm glad to see a lot of the fundamentals of the core product remain in place today. While Sitecore has a heritage in being web-focused (fun fact: the name came from Site Content Repository), it has expanded in capabilities and innovated many features over the years, yet kept to the core architecture we love. One of the most foundational aspects - separation of content and presentation - remains relevant today with multiple channels needing to consume content. Speaking of the famous web channel, my last fun fact for you: Sitecore holds the patent for composing a web page layout with modular components into a set of placeholders (or page zones).

Special thanks to those that initially nominated me a decade ago: Nick, Jeff, and Bob.

Also, shout out to my original mentors: Mark Stiles, and Mark Graber. (Marks stick together)

And finally, congratulations to all of the 2021 MVPs and my MVP colleagues at Rightpoint:

• Gabe Streza
• Gaurav Agarwal
• Mahendra Shekhawat
• Mike Marnocha
• Phil Paris
• Rob Ahnemann