How to use new features of Sitecore Experience Accelerator 1.3.1?
Sitecore has released the latest version of Sitecore Experience Accelerator 1.3 Update 1(rev. 170519) in May 2017. With this release, Sitecore has brought some new exciting and useful features to use.
Additional Packages
First important change Sitecore has done is to provide the CD packages for Sitecore Experience Platform 8.1 and 8.2.
So you can deploy CD package on CD servers to install minimum required files like dll, views etc.
Site Themes Place
In latest versions, new site themes are now stored in the Themes branch in the Media Library.
So in the previous version 1.3, when you create new theme during the creation of a new site.
The new theme is added to the Site folder in the Media Library and so new themes are created like /sitecore/media library/Project/New tenant/New site/Editing Theme.
In the case of a new version of SXA 1.3.1, new site themes will be created in the Themes branch in the Media Library. So when you create a new site in SXA 1.3.1 then the following screen will come up.
You can see that a new folder “New tenant” is already there. This will contain all the projects and their respective themes. Once a new site is created with a new theme, this will be added at this location e.g. /sitecore/media library/Themes/New tenant/New site/Editing Theme.
Site and tenant security
Site and tenant security scaffolding provide an easy way to apply security roles to a SXA site. SXA version 1.3.1 provides a feature to setup security for a tenant and a site. So if you right click on tenant or site and then click on the script, you will find a new feature called “Setup Security”.
If you select this “Setup Security” feature then it will let you setup different information.
Security Domain
Security Roles
In addition to above, this version has other features like it has added Error Handling to scaffolding as a feature, Grids now have their own editing themes so grid-specific editing functionality can be added etc. Additionally this version is expected to increase performance of SXA page rendering by 50%.