Sitecore Prefabs
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) and other similar solutions leveraging dynamic placeholders provides page designers with a powerful set of reusable components. Grid layout tools like rows and columns can allow marketers to build pages to their imagination. BUT… with great power comes… tedious set up.
I’ve really enjoyed SXA’s support to empower the client with a powerful toolset to create custom content pages. However, I’ve also found myself spending countless hours configuring rendering parameters so the page matches the graphics mock-up, or trying to match pieces of other pages that I like. Get the grid settings just right for responsive design, add that extra padding, get the right color, and variant; nest it properly within page structure components, on and on… and then do it again on the next dozen pages.
“Standard values!” you may say, or “Branch Templates”. But I’ve been wrestling more and more with content heavy sites where common groupings of renderings are used, and not so much consistent page templates.
Introducing Sitecore Prefabs!
An author’s library of prefabricated components. This module allows you to save a section of a page as a prefab, then use it and reuse it anywhere else. Unlike SXA Composites, a prefab is a set of pre-configured renderings that get recreated at the selected location of a new page. There is no persisting link. It’s kind of like a branch template for renderings instead of page templates.
It turned out to be a bigger effort than expected. Nonetheless I’m pretty happy with how it supports difficulties like dynamic placeholders, local page data, and multiple instances.
Check it out on my GitHub, https://github.com/digitalParkour/Community.Foundation.Prefabs/releases. Sitecore packages and source code available. I’d love to get your feedback.
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