Inside Sitecore’s New Marketplace: Building the First Wave of Apps with the Early Access Program

The Sitecore Marketplace has been eagerly anticipated since it was announced at Sitecore Symposium. The Sitecore Marketplace is a hub for curated, ready-to-use apps and extensions that enhance the Sitecore digital experience platform. It provides the ability to customize XM Cloud instances, integrate Sitecore with third-party services, and build apps that can be either private for your organization or shared with all Sitecore users. Being a brand new feature, there were also a lot of open questions about how it would work, especially regarding app development.

I had the opportunity to be a part of Sitecore’s Marketplace Early Access program, in which Sitecore invited select partners to get early access to the Marketplace SDKs, documentation, and technical guidance, and work closely with Sitecore to develop initial apps to populate the Marketplace and provide feedback to improve the developer experience. I used the opportunity to develop my Content Export/Import Tool as a Marketplace app.

The developer experience was surprisingly easy and straightforward. Sitecore’s documentation for developers is thorough, and everything you need to get started is in the Marketplace SDK Quickstart Guide.

These are the basic steps:

1. Create a new NextJS application

2. Install the Marketplace SDK packages

3. Copy the Marketplace Client hook code from the documentation

4. Copy the effect hook from the documentation to initialize the Marketplace client

5. Start your app running, and start writing code!

The Marketplace SDK handles all of your GraphQL requests, which is the preferred method of getting Sitecore data in an external application. The SDK provides a simple interface that makes creating requests easy and applies all user permissions to the queries.

Once the application is set up, the other step is to configure the app in the Sitecore Portal. This part is also very simple.

1. In the Cloud Portal, go to the Developer Studio and create a new app.

2. Configure the extension points that you want the app to be available on. This will determine whether the app is a standalone app, full page in XMC, a Page Builder pane, custom field, or dashboard widget.

3. Grant access to the APIs you need.

4. Set the Deployment URL. While you are developing, you can set this to the localhost URL that your application is running on.

5. Activate the app and install it to your Sitecore instances with just a few button clicks.

Once the app is complete, you will need to host the app in Vercel or Netlify and make sure it has a publicly accessible domain. You can then change the Deployment URL of your app to the public URL. The Sitecore Portal loads the app in an iframe, so if the Deployment URL is set to localhost, it will only work locally, which is fine for development purposes, but you will need to change it to a public URL to share it with other users.

Marketplace is still in development, so at this time only Custom apps can be created. Custom apps can be shared within your organization, but will not appear in the public Marketplace. Once Public apps are available, you will be able to create apps that are available to all Sitecore organizations and listed in the public Marketplace. Users can create any Custom apps they want, but the Public apps will undergo a review process to ensure quality of the Marketplace offerings.

The only potentially difficult part of the process is figuring out how to actually code your app (depending on what you’re trying to accomplish), but the entire setup couldn’t be easier. The process is simple, fast, and very user friendly. Sitecore was very responsive and helpful during the Early Access program, though I needed little help since the process was so easy and well documented. As a developer, I had a great experience making my first Marketplace app and can’t wait for you to try it out.