Sitecore Sidekick

One of the struggles with any CMS is how to move content from one enviornment to another. Each CMS tends to have its own flavor of how to do this. With Tridion you have the content porter for better or worse, often worse. With Sitecore you have a few options between Unicorn and Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) and a few others. Both Unicorn and TDS are focused on moving content out to production. What I mean by that is they are really good and moving content item from development out to production. They don't really support the use case of bring content items from production or other higher level enviornments down to lower level environments. So what do we do with that content authors create in production that we would like to seem in all enviornments and make standard in our deployments? This is where Sidekick comes in.

Jeff Darchuk has created a great little plugin to Sitecore called Sidekick. This plugin makes it really easy, and fast, to copy anything from one environment to another environment. The tool will even tell you want is out of sync between the source and destination environments.

Now keep in mind you probably don't want all your production content checed into soruce control and deployed to every environment. That might cause some unneeded bloat in your solution and deployments. But for those core use cases where you need to keep some content in sync with production Sidekick to the rescue.

Jeff's site has all you need to know to get started using Sidekick. He has also been very responsive to issues logged in GitHub. Just launch Sidekick and have it pull in content from an environment. Unicorn and TDS can then pick that new content up from your local development instance and serialize it into your source control.

Sidekick even connects into Sitecore's scheduler so you can schedule syncs! Ever have an environment you want to keep in sync, like a User Acceptance Test (UAT) or a production shadow copy? Sidekick might help you there as it can keep the content trees in sync via scheduling.

All in all we have found this to be a pretty great tool to help solve some of this use cases around syncing content. Hope you find it useful!

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