Reusable HTML components in third party applications

Question

I have a requirement where in the header and footer of the application can be reused in a third party application to give consistency to multiple application. In Sitecore usually we create header and footer as components and add them to placeholder or statically bind them to the layout. In both the cases header and footer will not be any physical entity in isolation which can be reused in any other application (for e.g. within iframe or old style include). Is it possible to create html pages for header and footer in this scenario retrieving from sitecore repository?

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible. You can solve this problem to create Web API which gives back the HTML of your footer and header.

Consider the following things:

• You need to pay attention for that you don't have Sitecore context in these calls
• If these applications are on the same servers or in the same internal network you can be more safe to don't make this API public

You can even try Federated Experience Manager: https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/digital_marketing/federated_experience_manager/the_federated_experience_manager. Which is giving you much more functionality, like personalization and tracking. (I got this hint from @MarkCassidy around a year ago :))