Overview of Visitor group content in your site

The new Visitor group functionality in EPiServer looks very interesting and I was so fortunate that I got a demo by Mats Hellström earlier this year but have been busy so haven’t had time to blog about my thoughts.

As I said earlier It looks very interesting but  my first impression was that the built in functionality had been focusing too much on making it easy for both developers (how can I nag about this?) and editors to create new visitor groups and use them to present content and totally forgetting about how to manage all this new content.

Since I’m currently working with a very large installation with many sub sites and a lot of pages my guess is that if we let the editors loose with this, we would in a couple of weeks have massive problems with visitor group driven content all over but no one knowing exactly where.

So how to improve this then.? My first thought was to add an icon to the page tree.

Since I did this during another session and on a colleague's laptop I didn’t have my playbox machine available but a quick googling I found an excellent post by Anders Hattestad.

With some modifications I got it running and the result looks like this:

Of course this need to be developed further with possibility to filter from a list by available visitor groups, maybe modify the tooltip and more but at least it’s something.

This is something that could help the editors find their pages with visitor group content but I believe that some additional module is necessary to supply an overview of visitor group content for the chief editors and for example decision makers of a certain campaign.

Maybe in an R2B release?

Hot to get it running.

1. Get file

2. Add to project and modify namespace, class name if you want.

3. Modify the adaptermappings.browser file with changes from .2.

<adapter controlType="EPiServer.UI.WebControls.PageTreeView" adapterType="EPiServer.PageTreeViewAdapter" />

4. Done.