Welcome to another post of the Digital Experience Accelerator (DXA) marathon, meant to explain how DXA works, what are the different ways to use it and how can you contribute to it.

Yesterday’s post looked into DD4T (Dynamic Delivery 4 Tridion), in particular at how to use the extension point in IModel to add custom information into the DD4T models.

Today we will have a different blog as I have interviewed Bart Koopman, Technical Product Manager at SDL. He is one of the founding fathers of the DXA implementation, formerly known as SDL Tridion Reference Implementation (TRI).

So Bart;

Q: Why was DXA built?
A: DXA was originally designed to become part of the SDL Web 8 platform, to deliver a complete and production ready implementation example. This to make is easier for Customers and Partners to get started with SDL Web 8. Because we started in early 2014, we originally based TRI on SDL Tridion 2013 SP1, and decided to release it separate so we could get the necessary feedback from our community.

Q: As you mentioned the original name was TRI, why the rename?
A: Tridion Reference Implementation is like the name says a reference implementation, to give developers an insight on how things could be done. Digital Experience Accelerator on the other hand is a “tool”; it gives your implementation a jump start. Including the currently available modules the work for a developer focusses on the integration points of an implementation.

Q: What are modules, which are available and what can we expect?
A: A module is a self-contained package of web application functionality; it can contain Models, Views, Controllers, Integration code. The modules currently available for DXA 1.2 .NET are Google Analytics, Media Manager, SmartTarget, and Search (Solr & AWS Cloud Search).

The Java modules are coming with the 1.3 release of DXA, which is scheduled end of January 2016.

One of the next modules the team will be focusing on will be an eCommerce module, but personally I hope to see some community modules build by partners or/and with support of the DXA team.

Q: When I create a DXA module, where can it be released so the community can find it?
A: Packaged DXA modules (and any other type of SDL Tridion/SDL Web extension) can be uploaded to the Tridion Developer eXtension section of the SDL community site: https://community.sdl.com/developers/tridion_developer/m/mediagallery

You can register yourself for free on the community site and request access to the Tridion Developer group, once you have done that; you can simply upload your extension or module. Or create a blog post on the community website describing what your modules does, how it works and where to find the source; which you can store on GitHub or Bit bucket for example. Or create a pull request on the SDL GitHub, have the DXA team review it and make the decision to add it to the modules collection core.

Any type of contribution is valued!

Q: Is the DXA supported?
A: The official support statement for DXA, listed in the documentation says to reach out to the community. BUT we are committed and driven to making DXA a success, which also means we will never let you down when you are in need of any help. We are currently working on making it possible for our customers and partners to log tickets on DXA version 1.2 through the normal Customer Support channels.

More about this will follow shortly when the details are clear.

Q: So when can I follow any trainings or workshops for DXA?
A: The idea behind DXA is that it’s build with extensibility, best practices and industry standards in mind. Having this followed we hope it to be self-explanatory with guidance of the documentation available at http://docs.sdl.com/sdldxa.

This means we currently have no specific trainings or workshops planned as part of our releases. However the SDL Education department has adjusted their SDL Web trainings to be based on DXA as starting points. A schedule of these trainings curriculum, including SDL Web 8, can be found at http://training.sdl.com/services/education-certification/training-product/web-content-management/.

It’s also possible to arrange a custom DXA workshop lead by one of SDL Professional Services consultancies, for this you can contact your account manager for that. 

Q: Why was the Twitter Bootstrap Framework chosen for the HTML Design?
A: The Twitter Bootstrap Framework was chosen with Industrial Standards in mind. We wanted to have a standard framework for our HTML, supporting responsive design and to force the agency to focus just on styling the design and we can deliver both DXA and its modules completely ready and working out of the box.

Q: Why are the strongly typed models in DXA different from those in DD4T 2.0?
A: When we started with TRI there was no DD4T 2.0 .NET or Java builds available for us to use, only a few blogs talking about strongly typed models. In our version we used build 1.31 and made our own design choices to implement strongly typed models. We based our design decisions on automatic semantic mapping using schema.org (or any other semantic vocabulary), which is how we came to our current implementation.

This gives us among others advantages for Search Engine optimization and RSS feeds. 

Q: Do I have to use the Twitter Bootstrap HTML design?
A: The answer on that is no, this HTML framework was chosen to make it easy for everybody to create working modules based on Industry Standards. Although we can’t imagen why, but if you rather have your own HTML framework to implement your views in its possible. This does mean you have to recreate all the views in DXA; this is similar when a new module is released. You should expect it not to be working (look and feel wise), if you are using your own HTML design.

Q: When looking in DXA, I can’t find any XPM tags, is it not supported?
A: Within DXA we implemented XPM out-of-the-box, so all implementation should have XPM. The reason you don’t see the traditional tags is because we implemented DXA is such a way the developer does not require any knowledge of XPM.

This means that a developer only needs to learn the following tags.

Q: So when can we expect the release of DXA 2.0?
A: DXA 2.0 is (at that time) the codename for the first official supported DXA release, and it is currently envisioned to be release somewhere mid/end of 2016. As mentioned before, we are doing everything in our power to help you with support in DXA 1.2 and beyond.

But this is all highly depending on the input of the community; we need your input, field experience and feedback on what works well and what doesn’t work well. That way we can ensure we build the things that bring real value, with the goal to keep offer a truly usable solution.

This means we might break compatibility to change DXA APIs over releases, to release this goal. These breaking changes will be done in 1.x versions, as of 2.0 we expect not to break any backwards compatibility.

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First of all I would like to thank Bart Koopman for his time and helping me with this interview. If you have any questions about DXA or the #DXAmarathon, feel free send me a tweet @jarnohenneman.

This was my #DXAmarathon, hope you have a better understanding on how DXA works, how to extend DXA and contribute to this implementation.