Site definition in SXA

SXA, a buzz word in Sitecore, is a rapid way to build your sites with Sitecore. It is a tool that provides you predefined and standard ways to produce your site. Creating Tenants and Websites is just a act of few clicks. But if you compare with traditional way of creating sites in Sitecore, ever wondered, where does it maintain Site Definition?

Traditionally, we created a site definition configuration when adding a new site, like this –

 <site
        name=”website”
        virtualFolder=”/”
        physicalFolder=”/”
        rootPath=”/sitecore/content”
        startItem=”/home”
        language=”en”
        database=”web”
        domain=”extranet”
        allowDebug=”true”
        cacheHtml=”true”
        htmlCacheSize=”10MB”
        enablePreview=”true”
        enableDebugger=”true” />

But with SXA, you do not need to care about it anymore. SXA creates site definition in a content tree at path. Now, if you compare all attributes from above configuration patch with this item field, you will realize its all same. Bingo!

This is a path to definition item,

/sitecore/content/~Tenant~/../~Site~/Settings/Site Grouping/~Site Name~

Now what if you wish to add a dictionary root in your site. Yeah, you guessed it right !!! Just add a DictionaryRoot attribute along with its value here and you are good to go.

You may add all such properties from site definition to modify your site definition.

Happy coding..