Introduction

If you are reading this book, you already know that Sitecore XP (Experience Platform) is not only an enterprise-level content management system (CMS) but also a web framework or web platform. Sitecore has robust and in-depth APIs to offer maximum flexibility to developers to implement custom solutions. It has many features designed to support enterprise-level requirements.

Sitecore provides extensive out-of-the-box components such as layout, device, placeholder, and some rendering controls, which play important role in designing and editing interfaces. We can also develop custom rendering components using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), ASP.NET Web Forms, and Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks to render content to the pages. All these frameworks currently exist in Sitecore, but MVC is now becoming widely used in Sitecore solutions and also provides better options compared to Web Forms and XSLT. Hence, we will prepare all the recipes using the MVC framework.

This chapter first serves recipes to create rendering components using model, view, and controller, and then explains how we can integrate them with Sitecore's out-of-the-box components. Looking into the depth of presentation components, you will learn extending these components in the next chapter.