Sitecore Interview Questions and Answers Part 1

 

1.      What is Sitecore?

Sitecore is very flexible Content Management System (CMS). It is one of the leading enterprise-level content management systems (CMS) using which you can create enterprise website and intranet portal website.

Sitecore was found in 2001 and it is built on Microsoft .NET platform. Sitecore also allows deployment via Microsoft Azure.

2.      Why should you use Sitecore?

Here are the top features of Sitecore CMS that separates it from other CMS:

·         It provides out-of-the-box flexibility and is highly customizable

With Sitecore you can create multi-language site with little effort

·         Provide personalized user experience and content variation features

·         E-commerce Services

·         It has out-of-the-box engagement automation and engagement analytics

·         Email Campaign Manager

·         Integration with Cutting Edge Technology

·         Highly Scalable

·         Improved Search Engine Optimization

·         User based and Role based Security

·         Over 350 free Sitecore Module available to use

·         Growing community

3.      What is core database?

This core database has two purposes:

·         The core database contains all Sitecore settings. It contains definitions for the Sitecore user interface (Content Editor, Page Editor, etc.). This is where you can add context menu option to the Content Editor or a new ribbon button to the Page Editor.

·         It contains the ASP.NET membership tables that drive authentication and security.

4.      What is master database?

The master database is the authoring database - it contains all versions of content. Whenever a new piece of content is created, edited or deleted it is stored here. This is the database that content authors interact with, and is the default database used by the Sitecore Content Editor.

5.      What is web database?

The web database contains the live content of the website. When a content editor publishes some content then it is copied from the master database to the web database. It is subset of the master database and optimized for size and speed.

6.      What is Item in Sitecore?

An item is a record in database. Items are basic building block of a Sitecore Site. An item may represent any kind of information, e.g. a piece of content, a media file, a layout etc. Items always have a name and ID that uniquely identifies the item within the database. Items have a template that defines which fields the item contains. An item represent a single version of piece of content is a single language.

An item can be retrieved from a database using Items.

7.      What is Template in Sitecore?

Sitecore uses data templates to define structures of item. Templates contain fields to represent individual elements. Each data template field has a type, such as Text, Image, Checkbox and various other field types.

8.      What is publishing?

By this time you are now aware with the fact that whenever you add, edit and delete any item in Sitecore, it will be stored in master database. Now in order to move this change to live website, you need to use publishing. Publishing is a process which will help you to copy updated items from master database to web database.

9.      Which are different types of publishing?

·         Republish

As name implies, it will publish every item no matter whether it is changed or not. It is intended to be used when you are publishing a new site first time. This is most time consuming publishing method as it blindly publish all items.

·         Smart Publish

This method works smartly by comparing each item in the master database with the item in web database. Sitecore maintains revision number for each item which gets changed whenever the item gets updated. By comparing this revision number with web database, it will create a list of updated items changes and will publish only those items changes. Even though this method is comparing each item, it is much faster than republish method.

·         Incremental Publish

Every time an item is changed, it is added to the publishing queue. This applies both to changes made through the Sitecore user interface and changes made programmatically. Doing an incremental publish will only publish the items in the publishing queue. Therefore only items that has been changed will be published and Sitecore does not have to do any comparisons to figure out which items has been changed. This way of publishing is therefore by far the fastest. Republish and smart publish do not use the publishing queue.

10.  What is versioning in Sitecore?

In Sitecore content authors have the ability to make a piece of content version able. Each version of an item begins as a replica of the original or of another version and are all stored in Sitecore. Previous versions operate individually and can be published as the active version of a content item instead of the most recent version. At any time an active version can be rolled-back to a previous version and vice versa.