We have been busy since Symposium – and we’ve just released the latest and greatest version of our Sitecore accelerator – SCORE(TM) 3.0. Through ongoing collaboration with key clients and partners, we’ve harvested and built some essential features that improve on the most comprehensive platform for Sitecore development. In this blog article, we’ll explore several of these features and help teams get started with SCORE 3.0.
New Features SCORE 3.0
We have experienced the dramatic impact custom field types can have on the user experience of the Sitecore content author. All of the new field types introduced by SCORE 3.0 have come from customer requests – and in some cases – were built in partnership with those clients.
Picture Field – Support for Responsive Images
In partnership with our valued customer Procter and Gamble, we have designed and built a solution to the problem that plagues Sitecore delivery teams – how to create an editor friendly answer to the need for device-specific images. (Without driving your developers or designers crazy!)
Here’s an example. Let’s say you use the image below in your responsive design.
Now, resize the screen to a mobile device and you might get something like this:
Not exactly what the designer intended.
Before SCORE 3.0 you would have to re-engage your designer to adjust the image for every device type and provide you will the resulting image files. Now, the Image Crop tool allows you to zoom, pan and change the focal point so that your images are perfect for all device types. And since this is a custom field type, you can make your own components or use components provided within SCORE.
Added Video Support
We haven’t come back to this topic for a long time. In 2014, we introduced a YouTube field type to simplify adding video to any website. With a simple, intuitive interface, a content author can search for videos hosted within the most popular video sharing website around. Many of our clients wish to have more control over the video delivery than YouTube offers, and some clients have significant projects in China where YouTube is a no-no.
So, by customer request – we’ve added the same user-experience for adding videos from 3 other popular video hosting services – Kaltura, Vimeo and Brightcove.
Enhanced Tiles
Tiles were also introduced in SCORE 2.5 – and now that we’ve had some time to play with them, they have evolved. If you’re not familiar with tiles it’s an easy feature to understand – for any page, you can create one or more tiles which represent alternate views of a content page. For example, a page in the website might include a “search result” tile to show what that page looks like in the search result grid, or a “featured” tile to show the page as featured content or a highlight.
In 3.0, we’ve added some neat features to tiles – such as a featured page component and a new custom field type to make using tiles straightforward for content authors. To make tile building easier, tiles can be created at a page level, or added to Standard Values for all pages based on a specific template.
The Evolution of SCORE Search
SCORE 2.5 was the first version to deliver our own spin on search – that is, search built with atomic design. As search has evolved, we’ve openly shared our experiences and methods with our valued partners in this space – including Coveo. Features include:
Search Box with Autocomplete (powered by tiles)
Faceted Navigation, and Live Search Grid (powered by Tiles)
What’s New for Search in 3.0?
We’ve added a number of new features for Search – still based on atomic design principles, still customizable, and still flexible enough to accommodate different design or UX requirements. For those who wish to use Lucene, Solr and Azure Search – SCORE has an “out of the box” search component framework to get you started on any project.
Multiview Search (powered by tiles)
We’ve added a new multiview search results panel to allow a user to toggle between views. Each view can select the layout of the list or grid and the tile to use for the item in the result set.
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Quickview (powered by tiles)
Quickview allows a visitor to select a search result to see a preview tile of more detailed information
New Facet Types – Range and Ratings Facets
The range facet allows a visitor to filter the result sets based on a numeric property by setting a lower and/or upper range value.
The ratings facet allows a user to specify a minimum rating to filter out any results that don’t meet expectations.
Added Support for Azure Search
We are sad to see Lucene go, but happy to see that Sitecore has now included support for Microsoft Azure Search. For those who wish to use Lucene, Solr and Azure Search – SCORE has an “out of the box” search component framework to get you started on any project.
Snippets and Tiles
SCORE Snippets have been around since our initial public release in 2014, but we’ve made some key enhancements since then. In 2.5, we added some crucial missing technology – the ability to copy and paste screen regions with the click of a button.
In 3.0, we decided to clean up the snippet UI. For Snippets that are shared and linked to pages, we updated the styling so that it doesn’t interfere with design.
Support for Sitecore 9.0 and 9.0 Update 1
Well, duh – of course we’ll support Sitecore 9 🙂
Sitecore 9 introduces Dynamic Placeholders as a first-class citizen. SCORE 3.0 adds support for Sitecore 9 including our assurance that existing SCORE clients can easily migrate to the new release. We’ve made sure that all unit tests pass, FakeDb actually works, and performed loads of testing for developers and content authors alike.
SCORE & Sitecore — It’s a No-Brainer!
Thank you for taking a look at the highlights of SCORE 3.0. If you want to see the full feature set, we’re happy to give you a demo and answer any questions your development team, partner or content authors might have.
If you are a Sitecore Implementation Partner, we’d love to discuss our Partner Program including new licensing options and an updated training program.
