Thank you Sitecore Community 2019

Amazing how fast 2019 has come and gone. So many hours spent working on and talking about Sitecore. In this post I share my appreciate for those donating through GitHub Sponsors.

GitHub Sponsors

It was a huge surprise to me this year when GitHub accepted my request (due to nominations) for the Beta program of GitHub Sponsors. If you've not heard about it you can read more about it here.

There's a new way to support your favorite developers and open source projects.

Yesterday we launched GitHub Sponsors, a way to fund developers directly within GitHub.

Sign up for the beta here. https://t.co/sF0uAdzgtp pic.twitter.com/5lVbBXYmPH

— GitHub (@github) May 24, 2019

I was so excited the signup started for the beta program. Then much to my surprise the Sitecore community rallied behind me and helped nominate me. I'm confident this increased my chances of getting into the program. Now GitHub Sponsors is out of beta so you too can apply.

Shortly after the sponsors started to sign up one by one. I'm forever grateful for your contributions. In 2019 these beautiful people found me worthy of supporting.

Then I was like


via GIPHY

So you might be asking yourself, "Why support Michael West?". I'm a contributor to the module Sitecore PowerShell Extensions and this requires quite a bit of personal time. I've enjoyed working on it these past several years and your support helps keep me going. If you feel like now is the time you would like to join in then by all means click this link right here!

How have the donations been spent?

• Purchased beer and root beer at various establishments.
• Loaded up on 100% Maple Syrup. Don't judge.
• Renewed SnagIt and Camtasia for the 2019 maintenance year.
• Covered some expenses for the Sitecore Symposium 2019 trip.
• Ordered new SPE gifts (stickers, coasters, buttons, etc.). If you are a sponsor and for some reason I haven't given you any of this please let me know. I'll ship it to you right away.

Photo of Michael and Adam at Symposium

Thank you so much to all those who donated through GitHub Sponsors.

Donut Caching with Custom SXA Components

In this article Michael shares how to make your custom components, built for SXA, support the donut caching feature.

Today we discovered that one of the forms on our site would simply refresh as you hit the submit button. Further investigation revealed that this component was added to the Sitecore cache. Whenever we cleared the cache the component worked as expected, once. Oh no!

The fantastical SXA module supports donut caching which is made visible through a checkbox on the rendering parameters.

Donut caching setting on the Page List component

This setting is added on the rendering parameters template. Not sure which rendering parameter template is used? You can check it out on the component defined under Layouts.

If you navigate to that item you'll see under the template inheritance a base template for caching.

If you wish to add support for this capability just add the template to your custom rendering parameters template.

At the time of this article, the template ID is {6DA8A00F-473E-487D-BEFE-6834350D5B67} and can be easily added in the Raw values mode of the Content Editor.

Note: When cloning components you will probably use the rendering parameters template included with the original component, in which case you don't even have to do anything special.

If you enjoy using SXA and what to share your appreciation to the team or have questions be sure to check out the #sxa channel on Sitecore Chat.