Early Access: Build the components your campaign needs

"We almost have the right component." If you work in marketing, you've probably heard this more than once.

You’ve got an idea for a campaign page, and you can picture how it should look. Then you open the component library and find something close, but the image gets less room than you’d planned and the message sits further down the page.

So you start bending the idea to fit. You try a different crop, shorten the copy and check the preview again. You can get the page ready with what’s available, but you’re making decisions around the layout rather than what you want the campaign to say.

Or you ask for a new component. That means writing a ticket, explaining the layout to a developer and finding room for the work alongside other priorities. Once it’s built, there’s a design review and perhaps another round of adjustments before you can use it. Everyone has a part to play, but now finishing one section of your page depends on work moving between several people.

Reusable components help teams keep a site consistent, but no component library can anticipate every campaign need. That’s the gap we want to close with Design Studio in SitecoreAI CMS: giving marketers more room to build from approved parts, while developers and designers set the technical and brand standards.
Early Access for component building and theming is now open.

Component building starts with atoms: small, pre-approved building blocks such as a heading, an image, a paragraph or a button. Your developers make them available, and you put them together.

Take a promo card for a new offer. You can combine those atoms around the image and message you want to highlight, adjust the layout and settings, and preview the result before testing it in Page Builder. You work visually, with or without AI assistance, without writing component code.

These simple components sit alongside the complex ones developers build and maintain.

A component that does the job also has to look like it belongs to the brand, and that’s where theming comes in.

Theming works from a token set, which is an existing set of design values for a brand. Your team's design schema decides which of those values you can change. Within those limits, marketers and designers can adjust them to create a theme for a brand or a campaign. You can then preview your component in that theme before you test it in Page Builder.

Now say the promo card is needed for two brands. You build the component once, apply a theme for each brand, and preview it in both. Component building shapes the section, and theming gives it the right look.

Consistency shouldn’t mean every brand or campaign looks the same. When you’re managing multiple brands, you need a repeatable way to build campaigns that still gives each team room to express what makes its brand distinctive.

Component building and theming give marketers and designers more freedom to bring their visual ideas to life, using approved building blocks and the design options their technical teams have made available. They can explore different layouts and brand or campaign themes within those boundaries, rather than starting from scratch or making every idea fit the same look.

That’s what makes this approach useful at enterprise scale: technical teams establish reusable foundations, while campaign teams handle more of the straightforward layout and styling choices themselves. The foundations provide consistency; the creative choices give each campaign its character.

Try these capabilities with a real campaign or brand need and help us understand what works, what gets in the way and what needs to change before wider release. Sitecore customers can bring marketers, designers and technical colleagues together to explore the experience.

Participants will have access to documentation and direct support and feedback conversations with Sitecore Product Managers and Architects. Testing activities and a feedback cadence will be agreed with each participating team.

Participant requirements: Getting started: You’ll need a developer or implementation partner to help with the initial setup, including installing the required beta Content SDK, preparing the atoms and configuring the design schema and brand tokens. From there, marketers can explore the component-building and theming workflows, with time set aside for testing and agreed feedback sessions. These capabilities are in Early Access rather than general availability, so beta packages may introduce breaking changes and require upgrades during the program.