Get started with Episerver Social
Recently we launched a developer portal for Episerver Social where all Episerver world members can try Episerver Social. Get your own account through the sign-up page!
How to get started
Installation of Episerver Social is easy. Download the Episerver Social Framework nuget package to your Episerver installation, add the XML-configuration in web.config to get connected and start developing! Full documentation and installation guide is available in the document section (link here).
The fundamentals
The Episerver Social platform is a collection of extensible services for defining and collecting community generated content. Work directly with our predefined services to manage comments, ratings, activity streams, groups and moderation. The services are easy to extend with prebuilt functionality for composites where you can combine e.g. a rating and a comment into a product review.
Retrieving your social data is easy as well with possibility to retrieve a custom result set of your social data using criteria’s. As an example, you can easily retrieve ratings for product X with a customer rating higher than 3. Of course, you can define how many ratings you want to retrieve (no need to retrieve more ratings than you're using right?).
Inspiration
Hopefully you are excited to try Episerver Social, here's some inspiration for your first try:
- A comment block where visitors can comment and read other comments for a specific page.
- Like button (facebook style) for your articles and/or news.
- A composite of a comment and rating creating your very own product review. Why not show the average rating together with the product?
- Use activities to create a feed of the articles and/or news that you have liked.
- A moderation flow to curate your comments, ratings and reviews.
- A forum using the comment service.
- Combine Episerver Social with Episerver Find to index the average rating together with your content (great blog post by EMVP Jeroen describing it here).
Dont mind downloading SocialAlloy for more inspiration (link to github here).
Happy developing!
David
I activated my demo account and made the simplest comments implementation I could come up with:
https://gist.github.com/deanebarker/4778abb70b0458ed5aa8849a9f90613d
Three files: HTML for the comment form, a Razor view for the comment list, and one controller for the Ajax endpoint.
Ridiculously easy to work with. It took me one hour, start to finish.