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The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator (DXA) is a reference implementation of SDL Web 8 and SDL Tridion 2013 SP1(*) intended to help you create, design and publish an SDL Web/Tridion-based website quickly.
(*) SDL Tridion 2013 SP1 is only supported up to DXA version 1.6. See https://github.com/sdl/dxa-web-application-dotnet/releases
What is it
The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator helps you create, design and publish an SDL Tridion-based Web site quickly by doing the groundwork for you: it consists of Publications that are ready to publish to a dynamic, responsive and device-independent Web site with a customizable HTML design.
The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator creates a foundation for you to build on and reduces the SDL Tridion domain knowledge required to develop front-end (Web application) functionality. It provides a standard for creating and sharing content-related Web application functionality and widgets to optimize and accelerate the delivery of SDL Tridion-driven Web sites with rich user experiences.
Audience
Using the Digital Experience Accelerator requires the following familiarity with SDL Tridion:
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Developers or Implementers are expected to know how to set up Content Delivery and publish content from Content Manager.
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Editors are expected to be familiar with the Content Explorer and Experience Manager user interfaces.
Objective
You can use the Digital Experience Accelerator to create a basic Web site quickly with as goal to get developer familiar with SDL Tridion and its concepts, or as a foundation to kick start your own SDL Tridion implementation.
Example Site
An example Web site is installed with the Digital Experience Accelerator containing stock content and pages used to illustrate the different content types and layouts available. The content is royalty free, so you can build your site by extending the example site. You can also start from scratch and create a new Web publication to manage your Web site.
Disclaimer
The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all solution for all requirements. SDL Tridion is an enterprise CMS which can be implemented to support almost any publishing model and web application architecture, the reference implementation is just one example of how SDL Tridion can be implemented and may not be the best solution for your organization's requirements.
Architecture
The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator Web application uses an MVC architecture.
Features
| FEATURE | IMPLEMENTATION |
|---|---|
| Web Application | Web Application uses an ASP.NET MVC 5 architecture (and DD4T-based Content Provider) and requires a database as its Content Data Store. |
| BluePrint | The default BluePrint structure is linear and consists of 3 Publications. You can implement your own BluePrint. |
| Security Model | Three Roles are defined: Site Manager, Editor and Developer. |
| Templating | Templating is implemented on the Content Delivery side using ASP.NET Razor Views. Some (.NET) Content Manager based template building blocks are used to publish navigation, configuration and resource data assets and the HTML design assets. |
| HTML design | The HTML design combines the Bootstrap framework with a number of third-party plugins and can be customized/extended on a number of levels. |
| Responsive design | The example site is responsive both client-side and server-side, the design changes adapts to the device from which it is viewed. |
| Navigation and sitemap | The organization of Structure Groups and Pages in the Publication is exposed in the following Web site items:
|
| Example site content | The contents of the site consist of "lorem ipsum" dummy content combined with royalty-free stock images. |
| Image resizing | A single high resolution version of each image is managed and published from the Content Manager. This is resized by the web application to fit the design of the content element where it is displayed, and the display properties of the client device. |
| Multi-language support | The Web site is set up to support multiple languages. Content Manager elements (schema and template names etc.) are all in English only. |
| Experience Manager | The majority of pages and content are fully editable in Experience Manager, and the example site contains a set of page types to create new content. |
| Site Features | The web application includes:
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| Integration | The Web site allows the following integrations:
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Sources
This distribution contains the DXA example Web Application in installable form and also the source code of the DxaWebApp project which can be used as starting point for your own DXA Web Application. On GitHub you can find a repository containing the sources of the entire DXA Framework to give you insight in how the solution is built and what is there available for you to extend.
Old versions
Older versions of DXA can be downloaded on the corresponding GitHub repository from the releases tab: https://github.com/sdl/dxa-web-application-dotnet/releases
Support statement
The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator is intended as a toolkit to help the SDL Tridion community and is not an officially supported SDL Tridion product. If you encounter problems, reach out to the community: http://tridion.stackexchange.com/
