Two Key Things Frontend Developers Need to Know Before Starting with Sitecore
Introducing the Sitecore headless approach a few years ago made frontend developers working on the Sitecore project happy. We had stopped hearing their complaints about unnecessary development complexity. Nowadays, there are many articles, tutorials, and videos for frontend developers. And they are good, but many are overwhelmed with information. Things are simpler, indeed. There are just 2 key differences for frontend developers to start to work with Sitecore:
- Page composition is not controlled in the frontend application
- You need to use specific components to render content if you want to make it editable
Page composition
Usually, when you build your application, you as a frontend developer control page composition. You set the location of all components on your page, their order, and the required nesting. Things are different when you work on the Sitecore website. In order to allow Content Editors to configure the location of components on a page, this responsibility is given to Sitecore. Frontend receives structured JSON from Layout Service. Then it is recursively transformed into components composition using Placeholders.
Fields
In order to make page content editable, you should use service components from the Sitecore JSS framework to render data. They are Text, RichText, Image, and Link.
After understanding and following these 2 principles, everything else becomes easy and straightforward.