One of the biggest evolutions of Experience Cloud (formerly known as Community Cloud) is the introduction of the Build Your Own (LWR) template. Sites that are based on this template are powered by the new Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) environment. And with our Summer ’21 release, this template is now generally available for all Experience Cloud customers. This blog post will show you what content we have in store to help you get started.
Why build with LWR?
In Experience Cloud, you can use a variety of pre-built templates that give you a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. With the Build Your Own (LWR) template, on the other hand, you have to build (mostly) everything from scratch. So why would you want to use it?
First, you get great performance for all your users, no matter whether they work remotely in Australia or in an office in Ohio. This is because with LWR we’re following a Jamstack approach. Jamstack (which stands for JavaScripts, APIs, and Markup) is an architectural pattern to deliver frontends faster and better to end users. Pages are statically generated during build time, and then these highly optimized pages and assets are delivered to a CDN (Content Delivery Network). As LWR sites are exclusively built with Lightning Web Components, we can bundle them to a Single Page Application (SPA) and deploy that bundle statically to our CDN around the globe. Data from a Salesforce environment, like CRM or CMS data, comes in via APIs (the “A” in Jamstack) and are always delivered live.
Second, you get full control and a great developer experience. With Experience Cloud’s other template options, you can customize some aspects of the UI, but not everything. With the LWR template, you can easily build pixel-perfect sites and bring brand consistency, not only to the page, but also to your components, as well as to base Lightning components.
When learning something new, some people like to read documentation, some like to explore code, and then others prefer viewing videos. So, we’re bringing a mix of everything to you!
Learn about Experience Cloud on YouTube
We recently published the first four videos of a new mini-series, exclusively focused on Experience Cloud and LWR sites.
Over the course of the next weeks, we will publish 6 more videos, each focusing on a single topic. We keep them short and honed, so that you don’t have to spend hours learning something new.
Check out the YouTube playlist, and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel, so that you’re notified right away when a new video is available.
Learn about Experience Cloud with code
For those who love to tinker with code, we have something in store for you too! As part of the video series, we also published a new sample app: AZ Insurance.
The sample app, which is part of the sample gallery, is designed to have three different LWR sites, each for a different use case:
- A marketing site
- A customer portal (behind a login)
- An employee portal (behind a login)
The sample app will initially start with the marketing site and will, over the course of the video series, evolve with the customer portal and the employee portal. This is a great reason to hit the “Watch” button on the GitHub repository, so that you’re always informed.
Summary
Building with LWR sites is a lot of fun. But you do have to understand how it works, what you are able to do (and not), and how to do it. We’re trying new ways to help you get started by publishing a sample app and related videos for a specific topic. We hope you enjoy picking what medium works best for you.
Check out the YouTube playlist and the sample app on GitHub. And don’t forget to subscribe to the news on both of them.
About the author
René Winkelmeyer works as Architect, Developer Relations, at Salesforce. He focuses on enterprise integrations, JavaScript, Node, and all the other cool stuff that you can do with Salesforce technologies. You can follow him on Twitter @muenzpraeger or on GitHub @muenzpraeger.