Interview Questions – Introduction to Sitecore

What is CMS? – Web Content Management System (software) enables non-technical CMS users to maintain the content driving a web solution without the need to understand its technical implementation.
What is Sitecore? – Sitecore is a complete ASP.NET-based development platform and web content management system (CMS). Sitecore is a high-performance, scalable, extensible ASP.NET web CMS that generates all output dynamically and uses the same components and system architecture for both content and application pages. You can think of Sitecore as providing an extension to ASP.NET itself, including browser-based user interface, abstract data storage, complete application programming interfaces, and opportunities for configuration, extension, and customization.
What is the difference between Sitecore and SharePoint? – Sitecore is a developer platform used to build websites/intranet with 100% control over markup. Where SharePoint is a portal solution with ready to use functionalities and does not provide 100% control over markup.
Is Sitecore a framework or platform? – Sitecore is an extensible framework (developer platform) that provides basic building blocks to develop almost anything you want.
What are the facilities provided by Sitecore? – Following are the facilities:
1. Flexible, hierarchical data storage
2. APIs and points of configuration and extension, including hooks into the user interface, pipelines, event handlers, and much more
3. A layout engine that dynamically assembles and caches ASP.NET control trees, making it easier to implement a consistent solution by reusing code and content than an inconsistent solution by cutting and pasting
4. The concept of devices, which enable different presentations of individual content items under varying conditions
5. Security, including authentication, authorization, role, and profile management based on ASP.NET membership providers. With the latest Sitecore version, you can implement federated authentication as well to authenticate the user from Facebook, Microsoft Azure AD, etc.
6. Workflow and separation of unpublished content from a published content
7. Visual comparison of differences between versions of field values
8. A media library for managing binary assets
9. A rule engine for browser-based configuration of dynamic logic for personalization
10. Digital Marketing System
11. Development tools such as Sitecore Rocks extension for Microsoft Visual Studio
Why Sitecore requires an integrated application pool in IIS? – To pass all the requests through Sitecore pipelines, an integrated mode of the application pool is required.
How many default databases Sitecore works with? – There are three default databases Sitecore works with, they serve the following purposes:
1. Master – The master database contains all versions of all content, including changes not yet published to the live website. Excluding Sitecore debugger, CMS user interfaces access the master database by default.
2. Web – The web database contains only published versions of each item in each language. The web database is the default publishing target database. By default, Sitecore publishes all the changes from the master database to the web database.
3. Core – The core database defines the Sitecore user interfaces, and controls that users can access via various applications. The core database also contains the tables used by the ASP.NET security provider. With the latest Sitecore versions, you can use a separate database to store ASP.NET security information.
What are the different applications provided in Sitecore? – Following is the list of CMS user interfaces available:
1. The Page Editor (Experience Editor) – for non-technical content contributors
2. The Content Editor – for more advanced content managers
3. The Sitecore desktop – for administrators, advanced content managers, and developers.
4. Workbox – Manage active workflow processes
5. Control Panel – Manage system and personal configuration options
6. Experience Analytics
7. Experience Profile
8. User Manager
9. Security Editor
10. Marketing Control Panel
11. Experience Optimization
Why do you say Sitecore is a development framework? – With Sitecore, you can implement information architecture and presentation components to generate output in any way you want. Sitecore does not provide data structures or presentation components to capture and present your solution; you use Sitecore to implement these components to deliver the solutions needed.
What is the purpose of the data folder in Sitecore? – Sitecore uses the subdirectory specified by the dataFolder variable in web.config file to store data files such as license, logs, and Solr search indexes.
Define Content Management and Content Delivery Roles in Sitecore – The Content Management role provides Sitecore CMS administration panel to work on content, data templates, and presentation components setup in the Master database, while the Content Delivery role serves the live website from the Web database.