Coveo for sitecore get started step by step part-2 (Installing a package)

 Hello Folks,

As promised, Today i will be showing you what are the initial first steps towards getting up and running with Coveo for Sitecore.

In my previous blog post PART-1  i have given some basic understandings of few things of Coveo for Sitecore, if you have not checked them, check them out by clicking the link given above.

So very first thing that you need is to install a package of Coveo for Sitecore from the Coveo official website, Here is a end point from where you can download the package for your preferred Sitecore version.

Coveo for Sitecore Release & Download It is worth checking for supported sitecore version and dependencies

Let's start

1) Ok, because i have set up one instance of Sitecore 10.1 on my machine, i will download corresponding package from the URL above, you can see my version in the below screenshot 

so i will be downloading package for 10.1 and hence see below screenshot, i will be first installing Coveo for Sitecore package 10.1 and after that i will install SXA module package, Because to install SXA module for Coveo Sitecore, you first need Coveo for Sitecore package installed on the instance

2) now i have installed the package and i will be installing it from Sitecore install package wizard like below 

as you can see the package is the compatible package that i downloaded for my Sitecore version, now we just need to go and install it and in the last final step, it will ask us to connect with our organization, i have mentioned about what is organization and what is the purpose of it in my "PART-1"

3) Once you finish installing at the last step, it will ask you to activate the Coveo for Sitecore package by signing into to the organization

On clicking "ACTIVATE COVEO FOR SITECORE PACKAGE" button, it will take you to the login screen from where you can login into your coveo organization 

4) I already have my test organization set up using my office365 login, but there are different options too, go ahead and create the organization or select the existing organization like below, because i logged in with my already associated organization for which coveo license was already purchased so it gave me selection of which organization i want to select from which are already activated for using Coveo for Sitecore 

Select how you want to index things, i have selected "Only Index Sitecore item data", but you can also index rendered HTML too, but as we are building a search page which needs to read and indexSitecore items, i have selected second option

Also as described in my previous article about organizations and farm name etc, here also Coveo will ask to provide a "Farm name", what is farm name and what is the use of it is i have given information on my "PART-1"

5) For this demo, i will give farm name as "D-Demo-Farm" and i have provided my current Sitecore instance admin user name and password, once done click "Activate"

6) So, after above step, once your coveo is activated for your organization against your current Sitecore instance, and you will be able to see the default coveo_master_index and coveo_web_index on the coveo dashboard, because we have not indexed anything yet it has no documents yet

So far so good, we have now installed Coveo for Sitecore in our Sitecore instance and we can now index our content so we can start creating our search page from it

7) But before we do that, we will need to install another package for all coveo components so we can utilize those components to create our page, now as coveo for sitecore is set up in our local, we can go ahead and install "Coveo for Siecore SXA components" package from the same URL i mentioned above

NOTE: Perquisites before installing this is, We should have Coveo for Sitecore installed (which we already did) , and SXA should be installed on the Sitecore version too

8) After successfully installation of these two packages, let's verify that all Coveo HIVE templates are available in our template section, so we can create components and data source from it for our search page

9) As we can see templates are available, now before creating a search page we will need to create and location where all coveo data source and its components will reside, we will do that in our site settings area, we will need to right click our settings and select "Insert from template option" and create a folder all coveo for sitecore components like below

10) now, we will need to select a template from which we can create a folder where coveo components can reside, select "/sitecore/templates/Coveo Hive/Structure/Global Folders/Global Parameters Folder" in template path and give item name as "Demo Coveo", once done it will create the container folder and which will have all insert options available to start creating coveo component data sources which will be needed to be configured for coveo search page.

Phew !!! i think it is lot of information at once, so let's take a pause here and in next article i will show you how we can start creating a search page and start configuring the components on that page, we will need to do some house keeping, indexing of items, create some items and populate them with data and index them etc.

I hope so far this series is adding some value in implementing Coveo for Sitecore.

Tips & Tricks

Because our purpose is to understand basics hence we are going step by step, but, do you know? Coveo provides example page branch templates from which we can create page item and it will by default create all the needed items for us, we just need indexed data and some configuration and it a search page will be up and running, See below how i have create one sample page "Example Page" by selecting "Example Template", like below 

So above is the template you will select from "Insert from template" option on a home item and once done, you will see all coveo component data source and parent folder items will get created automatically, like following

 

Cool, haan? We will utilize this fast approach and create our custom search page from it

 See you in the next article !!!