Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) - Installation Tips 

If you are like me you will be keen to run up the new Sitecore Experience Accelerator. For those of you that haven't heard of it, it's a brand new development accelerator kit from Sitecore that adheres to the Helix principles, read an overview of the Helix principles here from Ryan Bailey.

Sitecore describe SXA thus: 

"Web development teams use Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) to speed up the production of websites and to reuse components, layouts, and templates across a variety of sites. SXA separates structure from design, so front-end designers, creative designers, content authors, and developers can work in parallel and you can deploy and maintain multiple sites quickly and cost effectively. Once a basic user experience plan is in place, everyone can get started on the platform. For example: the content author can start entering the content in the wireframe environment, while the front-end developer works on the theme, and the developer sets up the data templates."

You can read all about it on the Sitecore documentation site. 

If you are keen to install it and have a play there is a few things to note: 

It requires Sitecore Powershell extensions and they need to be specific to the Sitecore version you are installing: 

Before installing SXA, ensure that you have the following: 

• Sitecore Experience Platform 8.2 initial release or 
• Sitecore Experience Platform 8.1 Update-3 
• Sitecore PowerShell extensions for Sitecore XP 8.1 – full 4.0 or 
• later for Sitecore XP 8.2 – full 4.1 or later

 You can grab them here on marketplace.sitecore.net

The next things to note are 

• Make sure you restart the Sitecore Client AND Server after installation
• Make sure you go to Control panel and rebuild all search indexes.

You will need to change the layout on the homepage to one of the SXA layouts to start your fun.  

Important

Lastly SXA requires a license update, even if you are a partner you will need to get an updated licence to include SXA otherwise you will encounter this:

Have fun and I will be posting more tips and tricks as I explore more.