Magnus Rahl
Dec 17, 2010
  5533
(1 votes)

Working with personalized Content groups in CMS 6 R2

Introduction

Content groups is a concept used when working with content for Visitor Groups in EPiServer CMS 6 R2. If you are not yet familiar to Visitor Groups, check out Allan Thræn’s blog post announcing the CMS 6 R2 beta.

Content groups enable you to make sure only one piece of content is displayed to a visitor even if the visitor matches several Visitor groups. It also allows you to display content to visitors who don’t match any of your selected Visitor groups. This is best illustrated with an example.

The task

I want to display a friendly (more or less) greeting on the start page which varies with the time of day. For this I have created three visitor groups: Morning visitors (visit between 6AM-noon), Afternoon visitors (noon – 6PM) and Evening visitors (6PM-midnight). So let’s give them some personalized content!

Setting it up

First, I add a greeting intended for the Morning visitors, select that piece of content and click the Personalized content button:

contentgroup_1

That displays the following dialog where I select my target Visitor group.

contentgroup_2

If I were to save and publish the page now, morning visitors would get a greeting and anyone visiting at a different time would see no greeting at all. Not very polite!

So, I go on to add a Content group which the greeting is part of. I call it “Greeting”:

contentgroup_3

I click OK to add the personalization to the editor, and proceed to add a greeting for the Afternoon visitors. I mark that content and again click the Personalized Content button. I select to display the content for Afternoon visitors, and then select the (now already existing) content group Greeting:

contentgroup_4

I continue to add another one for Evening visitors, and then I add a final greeting where I don’t select anything in the Visible To box of the Personalized Content dialog. I still add it to the Content group Greeting though. In the editor the final result looks as follows:

contentgroup_5

Note the blue Greeting icon with the connected cord. This means all of these pieces of content are in the Greeting Content group and only one of them will be displayed, just as we intended. Note also the text in the gray box of the last piece of content, which very nicely explains that it will be displayed to anyone not matching any of the other visitor groups. It will of course match visitors between midnight and 6 AM since the other Visitor groups cover all other hours of the day.

I can use the Preview in edit mode to view the page as a certain visitor group, for example a Morning visitor:

contentgroup_6

And I can select to view it as no Visitor group at all:

contentgroup_7

So now you know how to work with Content groups! Happy editing!

Dec 17, 2010

Comments

tost
tost Dec 20, 2010 04:10 AM

Very well explained! Cheers!

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Boosting Graph Query Performance with Stored Templates

Stored Templates offer a solution by pre-generating and storing translated queries. This bypasses the time-consuming translation process, leading t...

Jonas Bergqvist | Feb 27, 2025

Exploring Optimizely SaaS CMS – What’s New & How to Accelerate your Build

In my latest video, I take a fresh look at Optimizely SaaS CMS , covering some of the recent improvements aimed at enhancing the editor experience....

Minesh Shah (Netcel) | Feb 27, 2025

Adaptive Images with Optimizely CMP

Images from Optimizely CMP can now be seamlessly integrated into Optimizely CMS through Adaptive Images, with the all same features that web editor...

Ted | Feb 27, 2025 |

Using the 1996 text-based Browser 'Links' to optimize website accessibility

Use a text-based browser from the late 1990s to improve the accessibility of your modern Optimizely website!

Tomas Hensrud Gulla | Feb 25, 2025 |

Using the 1996 text-based Browser 'Links' to optimize website accessibility

Use a text-based browser from the late 1990s to improve the accessibility of your modern Optimizely website!

Tomas Hensrud Gulla | Feb 25, 2025 |

Convert media type in a migrationstep

I needed to convert the type for some media files. Suddenly webp files were sent to the CMS from an external system and webp was not added to the...

Jeroen Stemerdink | Feb 24, 2025 |