October is the month for many exciting events. Halloween, the end of British Summer Time and... Sitecore Symposium

We've been following the events in Las Vegas with great interest and thought it would be worth highlighting the key announcements from this years conference.

Sitecore took the opportunity to unleash Sitecore 9 onto the market, and there are plenty of new features to take interest in.

The following is a quick overview of why we’re excited about this new release, and the features that are going to be especially useful.

Dynamic Placeholders

Placeholders have been a pain in a Sitecore developers side ever since Sitecore moved to a component based implementation in Sitecore 7. The implementation of dynamic placeholders in the core Sitecore product allows for real flexibility when implementing page layouts and makes the implementation of grid based layouts much simpler. We’re excited to see what we can do with them!

Redevelopment of the Forms Module

At long last! The original WFFM module was built by a member of the Sitecore community and steadily supported by Sitecore as an additional module. It always had it’s limitations though. Multi page forms and dynamic forms based on field dependencies were problematic and it usually made more sense to build a custom implementation for anything more complex than a form with a few fields.

The new module promises the ability to customise all areas of a form, allows for dynamic fields based on field selection and generally improves in all areas. Watch out for a further post when we get to grips with the new module.

Sitecore JSS services

To say this module has been eagerly awaited is a bit of an understatement. The objective of the Sitecore JSS services is to allow for headless instances of Sitecore to be deployed and integrate with varying consuming applications. This opens the door for Sitecore to power all sorts of applications, rather than just web sites; apps, in-store kiosks, virtual assistants - the opportunities are endless.

And this is just a few of the features that have been announced. We’ve not even touched on xConnect services yet.

It also means content can be made available to platforms other than the standard .NET stack.

There’s plenty of fun to be had here!

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