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Sitecore Hackathon 2018

Every year, the Sitecore community runs and takes part in the Sitecore Hackathon. Teams of 3 developers or fewer from across the globe work together to create outstanding solutions for Sitecore.

This year the event began on Friday March 2nd at 8pm EST and finished on Saturday March 3rd 8pm EST, and was a 24-hour coding event to remember!

This year was my first taking part, and we formed a team with James Gregory (@jameagle11) and Mohammed Syam (@m7mdsyam), two other Sitecore experts from Americaneagle.com.

The Challenge

The Sitecore Hackathon challenge was to write a module for Sitecore within 24 hours. There were 4 categories of ‘ideas’ the competing modules should fall in to:

  • Sitecore XConnect

  • SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator)

  • JSS (Sitecore Javascript Services)

  • Sitecore Commerce

Our Module : Sitecore ConneX with IFTTT

The goal of the module was to connect the Sitecore platform to all the hundreds of services available on IFTTT platform (If This Then That). IFTTT means if something happens, then something else will happen automatically. IFTTT is a free web-based service to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web services.

The following list gives more detail as to what our module can achieve:

  • On Sitecore form submit, create Salesforce Lead with all inputs submitted

  • If Sitecore Automation

    • If Specific state occurs, create Salesforce object (lead)

    • If specific Campaign reaches a threshold, Send out an email

  • If Sitecore logs specific message in logs for X number of times then send email/notification to administrator

  • Using Sitecore custom rules conditions and actions to monitor specific sitecore events or page events to trigger IFTTT events, Examples:

    • If Specific page events occurs (PDF download), Then create a salesforce lead

    • If a news items is published, then post a link to facebook/twitter

All the modules created during the Hackathon are available to the public – so if you’d like to use our code, you can find it here: Github Repo

This year, 74 teams from 25 countries took part in this year’s Hackathon: we were proud to be a part of the event, and look forward to competing again next year!

This article was contributed by Ahmed Okour and James Gregory

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Ahmed Okour is a Senior Sitecore Developer at Americaneagle.com. With his previous years’ experience with Sitecore, and as a Sitecore Certified Developer, Ahmed is one of Americaneagle.com’s Sitecore experts. Ahmed’s duties range from project development to third-party integrations to leading and training Sitecore programmers. 

Notably, Ahmed has contributed on many Sitecore projects, including Intrawest, Catholic Order of Foresters, USD, CalCPA.org, Townebank, Komatsu America, Littelfuse, Mathematica and the American Dental Association. 

In January 2016, Ahmed was named a technology “Most Valuable Professional” for the second year in a row by Sitecore, one of only 177 people worldwide to receive the distinction. 


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