Americaneagle.com Wins Sitecore Hackathon for Second Year in a Row

Congratulations are in store for Americaneagle.com’s Sitecore team. Senior developers Naim Al, Patrick Doran, and James Gregory have taken home the top prize for the 2020 Sitecore Hackathon in the Marketplace Website category.

The Sitecore Hackathon is a community-driven event organized by Sitecore enthusiasts from all over the world. Each year, participants are asked to develop and code a project using Sitecore’s core features in just 24 hours. This year’s challenge featured 3 different categories of websites for teams to build, a Sitecore Meetup website, a Sitecore Marketplace website, or a Sitecore Hackathon website. Over 82 teams from more than 23 countries competed and Americaneagle.com’s ‘X Team’ ultimately won for their Marketplace Website with a GitHub integration.

“I remember us saying that we’d already won because we got a chance to explore more of the Sitecore system and prove you can implement non-trivial functionality in a hurry with Sitecore,” Americaneagle.com Developer Patrick Doran said. “We got a lot out of exploring the data exchange framework and extending it for GitHub. This is something we’ll be able to keep with us for other projects.”

This year’s Hackathon win marks the second win in a row for Americaneagle.com.

The Project

The Sitecore Marketplace Website created by the Americaneagle.com team was meant to streamline the process to both contribute modules and search for modules within the Sitecore community. The site leveraged the latest Sitecore SXA 9.3 components in addition to the Sitecore Data Exchange Framework to interface with GitHub.

Contributors will visit a form where they can input their module information along with URLs for GitHub and their documentation. Additional metadata is gathered from GitHub to display with search results.

Consumers are primarily interested in searching for packages. The team used Cortex tagging and SXA search to provide search across the installed modules. The Sitecore Data Exchange Framework was leveraged to call out to GitHub and retrieve additional meta information on the search packages to enhance the user experience.

To get a closer look at the Hackathon 2020 project, take a look at the video below.