Introduction

Connecting the Sitecore XM Cloud Pages used to be possible but a bit of a hassle. Jean-François L'Heureux's blogpost about his written Google Chrome extension really helped the developer experience in that regard. He automated the procedures needed to connect your local host to Pages in a neat Google Chrome extension. However JSS 22.1 has been released and it's a brave new world for XMC developers!

What to expect

If you're using Sitecore XM Cloud, be ready to see a new addition to your Pages view:

This in and of itself does nothing unless you upgrade your XMC repository to 22.1. It's a nice addition improving the developer experience, but also be a gem and warn your content editors that changing anything via this dropdown menu is a developer centric addition and doesn't help them. For reference if you're not running a JSS 22.1 version of Next.js this will be the experience trying to connect to localhost:

Conclusion

To make use of this new feature introduced to Pages make sure to upgrade your Next.js repository to JSS version 22.1! For further reading Christian Hahn has 3 posts about the new metadata rendering mode written!

XM Cloud – Welcome the brand new Metadata Editing Mode for Pages (Part 1) XM Cloud – Welcome the brand new Metadata Editing Mode for Pages (Part 2) XM Cloud – Welcome the brand new Metadata Editing Mode for Pages (Part 3)