A Sitecore solution must have a solid architecture

To be able to reap the benefits from your Sitecore Experience platform it’s crucial that the platform is built using industry standards

Pintle office

Sitecore started off as a content management solution (CMS) in the early 2000s. Today the Sitecore solutions platform has grown into a full on marketing automation platform providing marketers with multiple marketing tools such as personalisation, content testing, omnichannel support etc.

However, before we can talk about personalisation, customer engagement or marketing automation, the Sitecore solution must be built with that perspective in mind. It has to serve as a solid foundation for all further integrations and so it has to be done right.
The platform provides such flexibility that there are at least 10 ways of implementing each feature or functionality. However, not all of them are good.
Everything we do at Pintle is focused on being compliant with industry standards and best practices in the first place.

It is crucial to extend the platform with functionality in the way that it still remains extendable, scalable and provides the possibility to be continuously upgraded.
Therefore the solution needs to have a solid architecture

Here are our main approaches:

Helix principles

Sitecore helix is a set of overall design principles and conventions for Sitecore development. Helix describes the overall architecture of your Sitecore solution and thus communicates some guidelines and conventions which should be durable and flexible enough to be applied to any Sitecore project or business. The architecture pattern described by Helix is often referred to as Component-based Architecture or Modular Architecture.

Extensibility in mind

Each line of code that is being written is compliant with Sitecore development industry standards. Everything has to be easily integrated (modularized, so it can be altered or removed at any time.

Source control first

All changes to the project are stored under a version control system such as GIT. Our development process is built in a way that different features can be developed in parallel and delivered separately after they are approved. This enables the truly agile approach in client communication and development process.

Continuous integration

This is a development practice that requires regularly deliveries to a stable environment. Each change is being verified by an automated built, allowing teams to detect errors quickly, locate them more easily and exclude human factors and manual errors.

Unit testing

Sometimes, it is quite a hard task to verify the functionality that is being developed. Here at Pintle we use unit testing technique which allows us to detect problems at early stages, simplify integrations, and makes sure that all further changes do not break existing functionality.

A collaborative approach to interaction development

Web pages are no longer static – through the use of latest technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL, we bring pages alive with animations, video and user interaction. Putting the user in control of how they obtain the information they look for in the best possible way.

At Pintle our work is continually tested throughout development, with QA processes in place for both design and build stages. All templates are built for accessibility, ensuring compliance with W3C guidelines and best practice conventions.

Some of the frameworks, libraries and tools we worked with:

  • jQuery
  • Zurb Foundation
  • Twitter Bootstrap
  • Angular
  • React
  • Gulp
  • Sass / Less
  • amp
  • Vue