Blog posts by Matt Pallatt is not a developer

I built a thing - nOSC & nOCP - an experiment?

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:00:55 GMT

I don't think I'm always that convensional. And that's where this starts...

So firstly, I was lucky enough to see OCP UI extensions for Optimizey SaaS a few months back - these are apps that extend the capabilities of the SaaS CMS platform using typescript apps built and hosted on the Optimizely Connect Platform (OCP). And I was even more lucky to get to be involved in the Beta program, getting first hand experience of what the platform can do. And well, let's just say that firstly I was impressed and then secondly I got carried away.

Content Transfer got migrated. A client we're working with uses Frontify as a DAM, so a picker got spun out of the OCP UI boiler plate - complete with it's own new search functionality and image manipulation features. This was partnered with a Focal Point Editor that allows CMS users to tell their websites' Head where the focus of the image should be. Then I used the Webhook mechanisms within OCP to create a whole CSP management suite with reporting. And then I built a full redirection management system, complete with solves for moved pages in the CMS and handling 404s.

As I say, I got carried away.

Then two things made me stop pretty much dead in my tracks - first, it turns out that actually, OCP isn't the most performant platform on the planet, and "Please Try Again" when trying to open apps is very infuriating, and then secondly, having considered OCP to be free when not using the database, it turned out that this wasn't the case, and subsequently that the pricing model for hosting OCP UI apps hadn't (hasn't?) been decided - so I'd been solving my real world problems in OCP, and it could well turn out that the cost of hosting them would make running a bunch of them significantly less than attractive - and they might keep returning "Please try again" on content queries.

Which is when my sneaky, non-conventional brain kicked in - I thought what if we could...

Host apps freely?
Be assured of their performance?
Secure apps on our own terms?
Upload them in seconds, not minutes?
Have apps share information between panes and be able to actually effect change in the CMS, and not be restricted to Graph and the API for Optimizely content?

So, I built it.

"not Optimizely's SaaS Companion" - nOSC. It rolls off the tongue.

It's a Chrome extension that (amongst other things*) acts as a harness for nOCP apps - what are nOCP apps? Definitely not OCP apps. But yes, they're typescript apps (or not), that can be hosted anywhere you want (my favourite free hosting choice is Lambda on AWS); there is a security contract that must be observed, including a token to ensure you can't just sideload other peoples nOCP apps into your nOSC harness, but ultimately you can build an app in whatever language or framework you like, so long as it conforms to "the contract" and token exchange rules.

nOSC works by injecting into your SaaS CMS (sidebar and fullscreen), but unlike the Optimizely OCP apps, because of the Chrome app proxy, there is two way communication between CMS and app - AND - access to the numeric page ID of whatever content you're looking at in the CMS, which means that in building nOCP apps you can actually control the top level page and use the page ID to link directly to editable content.

Here are 4 docked oCP apps, and 1 docked nOCP app - can you tell the difference?

But more than that - you can also push content into the CMS! As well as porting over a few of the OCP UI apps that I've built to be nOCP apps, I've also built a Category Explorer around the new SaaS Taxonomy implementation - an implementation that sees you guessing what categories might be called with some kind of predictive search interface. I did not like that so nOSC and nOCP to the rescue - Graph allows me to list categories, my Chrome app allows me to push selected categories into the Category field of the CMS content item.

You can see a selection of my nOCP apps at https://github.com/mattpallatt/nOCP-apps - along with more information on that security contract I mentioned.

They're configured both on server for connections into secure endpoints (once), and then in browser to pull the app into the harness (everyone who wants the app).

Excecpt of course, it would be really annoying trying to make sure that your entire SaaS CMS team have the same set of tools, right? So there's a import/export feature, and more importantly a "Load from Global configuration" in nOSC - set your enviroments, apps and other configs up once, export them as an encrypted configuration file and save it somewhere that the internet can see, then your entire teams browsers can automatically download and configure the app when their Chrome/Edge browser starts - apps automatically synced with everyone having access to the same tools with no fuss.

Right, so back to that asterisk up there. It's not _just_ about loading apps - one of my pet peeves with SaaS is not being able to allow CMS users to use custom styles in TinyMCE, so nOSC aims to handle that too.

On an enviroment by environment, text property type configuration (minimal, standard, enhanced) basis, you can add new styling options that are either applied as inline styles, or by dropping class names onto selected text. It's not quite "in the dropdown", but it's a meaningful step in the right direction IMO.

That's nOSC.

I would very much like to know what people think of this - I've said it's an experiment, and maybe OCP apps come out in October and they are free to host, and they bump up the performance, and releasing to hosting takes less than 5 minutes, and you don't have to worry about timeouts - but, if all that doesn't happen, then does this "experiment" become something that you and clients could use? "No, you crazy person" is a perfectly reasonable response.

Content Transfer addon comes to CMS 13

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:23:12 GMT

Whilst we're waiting the release of OCP UI apps and with it Content Transfer for SaaS, I thought I'd pull the features and functionality from the CMS 12 Content Transfer add-on across to CMS 13, and so I give you Content Transfer for CMS 13.

Unlike with CMS 12 there's no need for the Content Management or Content Delivery API as all the work is done with the REST API that comes out of the box with CMS 13.

Featurewise, it works exactly the same - it allows you to push published content (pages, blocks, images, references, documents, videos, etc.) between different DXP (or any CMS 13 instance for that matter) environments - though in a preview to what the SaaS tool is bringing, retargeting has been added, allowing you to now move content to anywhere in the target CMS!

So, choose what you want to move...

Then watch it and associated items wing their way to the environment of your choosing...

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Content Transfer coming to Optimizely SaaS CMS

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:04:53 GMT

Back in June I released Content Transfer on the Optimizely nuget feed – today I’m releasing version 1.0, because we’ve had it running out in the wild for a while now and nobody has shouted that it’s done anything other than work as expected and hasn’t destroyed any content. So, I’m a happy boy.

Related to this news, I’ve spent some of the last month porting a lot of that work over to Optimizely SaaS, working on the new OCP UI extension framework that’s being released later this year.

Content Transfer SaaS allows you to move content that you've authored in one enviroment easily to one of your other environments, without the need of Admin's Export and Import tools. It works in almost exactly the same way as the PaaS tool – albeit with a few extra bells and whistles for the SaaS experience – in that you set your environments up (in the Connect Platform, as opposed to CMS settings), then wherever you are viewing content (experiences, pages, blocks, images...) in the CMS you have the option to send it to one of your other configured environments. Easy peasy.

You’ll hopefully have roughly the same tree across environments and so a like for like transfer will be possible, but if you don’t then Content Transfer will do its best to locate where the content is supposed to land, and if it gets it wrong (or right), it offers you the option to re-position your content into a completely different place if needed.

As for bells and whistles, you can now transfer locales, content types, property groups and display templates as well as content!

All in all, I've been quite impressed with the SaaS OCP UI extensions, and it has been remarkable easy to get my PaaS extension over into SaaS, and looking forwards to it being available on the OCP UI ecosystem - so now we must wait patiently for Optimizely to release SaaS OCP UI extensions to the public (presumably around Opticon?) and hope that their pricing model for custom extensions isn't too eye watering.

LanguageMaster! From Managing to Mastering Languages!

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:52:15 GMT

Two years ago, I released my first Optimizely add-on. It was an extension to the Labs.LanguageManager tool from Optimizely that allowed the user to choose to use DeepL as their translation provider. I noticed recently that it has the highest number of downloads of any NuGet package used by LanguageManager – I’m very sure more to do with how many people are using DeepL rather than with the stunning code quality.

In the two years since, we have used DeepL and LanguageManager with a few of our clients, and I’m sure each of them would have a significant list of issues with both the functionality and usability of LanguageManager, and more than a few would have complaints about the quality of DeepL too – and I don’t particularly think the issues or complaints they're raised (and internalised) are unfounded.

As a tool, LanguageManager (which has been newly updated to support CMS 13) allows CMS users to select a root node, then either choose to include all children, and/or all associated blocks, and then fire them at a translation endpoint, where what is returned is used to create or update a new language branch version of the source page. It’s basic, though does the job, but also has some shortcomings – especially (in my humblest of opinions) with Page References in content areas, where suddenly those “children and associated content items” checkboxes can result in what you thought was a 15 item content translation job turning into 15,000 content items as the spider crawls outwards, upwards and forever on and on (this has happened, huge costs have been incurred, people have not been happy).

And you’re tied to one translation provider at a time – maybe Azure is great for general content, but products would benefit going through DeepL? And translations into Chinese must use Baidu because it’s got the best vocab for that locale. LanguageManager can’t do that without constantly updating the settings to match the provider you have in mind.

And the locale granularity problem, where in China for example, the many variations of dialect and character mean that the target slug as a translation target isn't ideal - you want Hong Kong oriented translations on /cn? No way!

In small demo sites, translation management can look simple, but in the real-world of CMS and Commerce builds, content relationships, reusable blocks, products, variants, regional language requirements and even provider functionality make it much more complicated.

Enter Language Master!

Powerful selection tools for choosing what you want to translate, including full CMS and Commerce content tree, and Smart Select functionality for batch selections!
Multi-provider functionality for different scenarios, with translation endpoints for MS Azure, DeepL, Google Cloud, Amazon Translate, Claude, Baidu, ModernMT, OpalAI and Smartling – or build your own!
Per provider translation caching – so you can’t accidentally end up repeatedly sending the same source language and content items to be translated!
Provider routing so you can choose which configured provider delivers translations for which content!
Chained provider routing allows you to make better use of monthly free character tiers across multiple providers. Once Azure’s free allowance is used, for example, fallback can seamlessly continue through Google’s free allowance!
Language target override allows you to use a specific provider-supported locale, such as zh-Hant-HK, even when your site branch uses a simpler slug such as /cn/!
Projects allow you to build translation packages over time and run them once when you’re ready to translate all your content!
Full audit logging allows you to see if anything went wrong and why!
Commerce support for Categories, Products and Variations!
And… Multisite support!

What all of that looks like in practice...

Language Master’s Tree View allows an editor to select page content nodes, select block content node, select child nodes - you have full individual control over what is going to be translated. It also shows what’s already been translated, and what’s still in need of a new language version.

For larger trees, Smart Select allows for batch selections based on defined criteria – content types, publish status, parent node, date modified – completely extensible interface to build your own criteria for selection.

Language Master has pre-built Translation Providers for MS Azure, DeepL, Google Cloud, Amazon Translate, Claude, Baidu, ModernMT, OpalAI and Smartling – all of which can be configured and activated at the same time! And a framework to allow you to build your own provider if it’s not in the list.

Your activated providers can then be used to create Routing Rules for different language pairs – with a fallback for if you’ve got no specific language requirements.

The same language pairs can be configured multiple times – essentially Chaining Providers - to provide fallback in the event of error – or having no translation credits left.

Provider Overrides mean that for content specific cases, you can abandon routing rules and send individual content items to a selected provider.

Language target override allows the editor to define the specific language code to be used to translate into – depending on provider availability!

Batch Update means that selected content items can have their translation properties – publish status, provider choice, name and slug translation options - updated all at once.

Projects update the tree view to show what is in the project and what is not.

Projects can support multiple language pairs, making it possible to prepare translation work for different source and target content items, and run them as a single package when the content is ready. This means you don’t need to have separate projects for different languages – though you can if you want to!

And provides a way of batching together multiple updates over time, to be translated all at once.

Audit Log allows the editor to see what has been translated and when, whether any errors occurred, and if needed allows the editor to invalidate any cache that exists for the content item and provider.

And it has Commerce support. Language Master covers Categories, Products, and Variations — not just CMS pages and blocks.

Going back to that DeepL extension: releasing it and watching it used across real projects showed me exactly where LanguageManager struggles. Not because it's a bad tool — it does what it does — but because real multilingual projects in production are messier than it was built to handle.

Language Master has been designed to tidy up that mess.

The packages are available on Optimizely's Nuget Feed for CMS and optionally Commerce.

If you try it, I'd genuinely like to hear what works, what doesn't, and what you'd want to see next - I'm thinking a SaaS version...?

Environmental DXP badges

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:02:56 GMT

I recently released my first Optimizely add-on in a while, that was based on some client feedback on the Optimizely DXP – they wanted to be able to push content from preproduction to production due to their workflow involving content creation taking place in the non-live environment.

Whilst working to make the UI for that tool as clean and helpful as I could - chiseling all the corners and gilding all the lilies, etc. - I ended up putting in a little UI mechanism to allow editors and administrators to see what environment they are in.

Just a little badge, that makes it clear where you are so that you know where your content is coming from...

Having put it into the content transfer tool, I then came across this…

https://feedback.optimizely.com/forums/966081-cms-paas-content-management-system/suggestions/50995978-ui-change-to-distinguish-prod-from-preprod-and-int

…and thought it might actually be nice to also give people who don’t want to copy content between DXP environments the same UI niceties to help them know which environment they’re working in - so it's now standalone, removed from content transfer tool, and working in CMS 12 and 13.

It's mega simple and also completely configurable on a per environment basis, so you're not stuck with integration, preproduction and production if your pipeline uses different terminology - TEST, UAT, LIVE, etc.

You can nuget it over at https://nuget.optimizely.com/packages/mp.dxpenvironmentindicator/ if you're interested.

Pushing Content Between Optimizely DXP Environments

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:06:23 GMT

We've been working with a client who has been on Optimizely 11 for a long time - self-hosted, on their own server infrastructure, with a content workflow that for various reasons sees their editorial team creating and getting internal sign off in staging, then manually recreating it on production. Because the editors don't have the admin access required to export and import content packages, every approved piece of content has to be rebuilt field by field in the production environment. It's time-consuming, it's error-prone, and it's the kind of friction that quietly chips away at a team's confidence in their CMS.

Recently we convinced them to upgrade to Optimizely 12 (13 is a bit too shiny new and a reach too far for them for the time being) and move into the DXP, and we've had a genuinely “interesting” time migrating them and ensuring that their hundreds of pieces of functionality, page types and blocks survived the transition intact. I’d been most excited about showing the performance gains from moving off the client's server farm and into the DXP - they are significant with substantial Lighthouse score improvements to back up the perception.

The client was seemingly pleased.

And then they asked: "Does moving to the DXP mean we can push content between environments?"

It was a requirement that nobody had mentioned before, and yet something that their editorial team desperately wanted.

Let’s face it, it's a completely reasonable question. The DXP is a managed cloud platform - surely it should handle that kind of thing? As we know, the answer is no, that's not what the DXP is built for. Content promotion between environments isn't part of the offering. Watching that land wasn't the highlight of my day.

So, I built something.

Using the Content Delivery API and Content Management API, I developed a gadget that sits inside the CMS and does exactly what the client needed.

You choose a page, pick the target environment, decide what publication state you want it to arrive in, choose whether to include child pages, and decide whether to overwrite anything that already exists at the destination. Hit Transfer, and within seconds the content you approved in Preproduction is live in Production. It does pages, images and blocks, and respects local and global assets.

It's a straightforward tool, but it solves a real problem - and for a team that has been manually duplicating content across environments for years, it should make a meaningful difference to their day. If you're on the DXP and this workflow sounds familiar, it's something worth exploring.

And it also potentially gets around circumstances where an export is just too huge to be reimported – one of my own bug bears – although it’s only been tested on trees of 20 pages or so, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be able to handle hundreds or thousands of pages.

Have a look over at https://nuget.optimizely.com/packages/mp.dxpcontenttransfer/

Category Management - Going old school & trying not to break anything.

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:12:34 GMT

You wait a hour for a bus and then 3 come at once.

The same thing happened to me recently where multiple clients with ageing websites (Opti 11) and a new content strategy wanted to see all of their content and categories mapped out so that they could update them outside of the singlular management experience that Optimizely provides.

We looked around for options and needless to say that whilst there were some viable solutions for Opti 12, our clients options were limited to zero with Opti 11.

So, I set around creating a solution to allow them to better, one off, manage their categories using .... Excel!

That's right, I fired up SQL Management Studio, and VBA for Excel, and I now share with you what has been so helpful for us.

Use this at your own risk.

Get content and category data out of Opti

Temporary tables and the messages view to the rescue...

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS #pages

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS #categories

DECLARE @website varchar(256) = 'www.erm.com'

DECLARE @i int = 0

DECLARE @j int = 0

DECLARE @n int = 0

DECLARE @m int = 0

DECLARE @catName varchar(100)

DECLARE @catNames varchar(max)

DECLARE @catIDs varchar(max)

CREATE TABLE #pages(pkID int identity(1,1), pageID int, linkurl varchar(500), PageName varchar(1000)) INSERT INTO #pages (pageID, linkurl, PageName) SELECT pkid, CONCAT(REPLACE(linkurl,'~/',CONCAT('"https://',@website,'/')),'"'), Name FROM tblContent INNER JOIN tblContentLanguage ON pkID = fkContentID WHERE linkurl is not null AND fkLanguageBranchID = 1 ORDER BY pkID

CREATE TABLE #categories(pkID int identity(1,1), catID int, catName varchar(100)); --INSERT INTO #categories(catID, catName) SELECT pkid, CONCAT('"',CategoryName,'"') from tblCategory ORDER BY pkID

WITH RecursiveCatQ AS (

SELECT pkid, fkParentID, CategoryName, CAST(pkid AS VARCHAR(MAX)) AS recursivePath

FROM tblCategory

WHERE fkParentID IS NULL

UNION ALL

    SELECT t.pkid, t.fkParentID, t.CategoryName, CAST(r.recursivePath + '-' + CAST(t.pkid AS VARCHAR(MAX)) AS VARCHAR(MAX)) AS HierarchyPath

FROM tblCategory t

INNER JOIN RecursiveCatQ r

ON t.fkParentID = r.pkid

)

INSERT INTO #categories (catID, catName)

SELECT pkid, CONCAT('"',CategoryName,'"')

FROM RecursiveCatQ

ORDER BY recursivePath;

SET @n = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #categories)

SET @catNames = ',,'

SET @catIDs = ',,'

WHILE @i <= @n

BEGIN

SET @i = @i + 1

SET @catNames = CONCAT(@catnames,',',(SELECT TOP 1 catName FROM #categories WHERE pkID = @i))

SET @catIDs = CONCAT(@catIDs,',',(SELECT TOP 1 catID FROM #categories WHERE pkID = @i))

END

PRINT @catIDs

PRINT @catnames

SET @i = 0

SET @m = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #pages)

SET @n = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #categories)

DECLARE @pageCatRow varchar(1000)

DECLARE @boolPageCat int

DECLARE @pID int

DECLARE @cID int

WHILE @i < @m -- pages / rows

BEGIN

SET @i = @i + 1;

SET @j = 0

SET @pageCatRow = ''

SET @pageCatRow = (SELECT top 1 CONCAT(pageID,',',linkurl,',"' ,PageName,'"') FROM #pages WHERE pkID = @i)

WHILE @j < @n -- categories / columns

BEGIN

SET @j = @j + 1

SET @pid = (SELECT pageID FROM #pages where pkID = @i)

SET @cid = (SELECT catID FROM #categories where pkid = @j)

SET @boolPageCat = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tblContentCategory WHERE fkContentID= @pid AND fkCategoryID = @cid)

SET @pagecatrow = CONCAT(@pageCatRow,',',@boolPageCat)

END

PRINT @pageCatRow

END

DROP TABLE #pages

DROP TABLE #categories

This produces something that looks like this...

Give it a copy and drop it into Excel - you might have to do your own formatting to allow your categorisers to better see what's happening - but from there, they can add 1s and 0s to the content and categories that they want to.

Push content and category data back into Opti

Once everything has been updated, take to Developer mode in Excel and you can use this...

Sub MakeMeSomeSQL()

Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim lastRow As Long, lastCol As Long
Dim i As Long, j As Long
Set ws = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet2")
lastRow = ws.Cells(ws.Rows.Count, 1).End(xlUp).Row
lastCol = ws.Cells(1, ws.Columns.Count).End(xlToLeft).Column

For i = 1 To lastRow

For j = 4 To lastCol

If ws.Cells(i, j).Value = "1" Then

Debug.Print ("INSERT INTO tblWorkContentCategory (fkWorkContentID,fkCategoryID,CategoryType,ScopeName) VALUES ((SELECT TOP 1 pkID FROM tblWorkContent WHERE fkContentID = " & ws.Cells(i, 1) & " ORDER BY pkID DESC)," & Left(ws.Cells(1, j), InStr(ws.Cells(1, j), "-") - 1) & ",0,0)")
Debug.Print ("INSERT INTO tblContentCategory (fkContentID, fkCategoryID, CategoryType, fkLanguageBranchID, ScopeName) VALUES (" & ws.Cells(i, 1) & "," & Left(ws.Cells(1, j), InStr(ws.Cells(1, j), "-") - 1) & ",0,2,0)")

End If

Next j

Next i

End Sub

You'll want to ensure that your language branch is set, but the above will create your own SQL to reinsert content and category data, which will look a bit like...

Just make sure to remove all the existing data first before you run the SQL that's created by the above...

DELETE FROM tblContentCategory WHERE fkContentID IN (SELECT pkID FROM tblContent WHERE fkParentID = 329) -- only delete the data from pages you'll be reimporting

DELETE FROM tblWorkContentCategory WHERE fkWorkContentID IN (SELECT pkID FROM tblWorkContent WHERE fkContentID IN (SELECT pkID FROM tblContent WHERE fkParentID = 329)) -- only delete the data from pages you'll be reimporting

As I say, use at your own risk, but if you have hundreds of pages, and tons of categories, the automation here has saved us and clients DAYS if not weeks.

Integrating HubSpot CRM without the MA Connector

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 11:11:41 GMT

Have HubSpot CRM? Want to push user data into it from Optimizely? Don’t have any personalisation requirements with that data? Don’t want to pay $800 a month for the Marketing Automation Connector? Then I have something that might interest you.

Recently we were working with a client who sat very much in the audience segment outlined above – they have HubSpot, they collect data from their website, they aren’t quite at the point where they want to start using any data from HubSpot to deliver personalisation, and they definitely didn’t have a budget for Marketing Automation Connector monthly charges.

Their requirement was for two specific forms – a contact us form, and a newsletter subscription, and we reasoned we could give them something completely rigid, with set fields that would only answer their current need – but we also knew, as I think every agency does, that what was a single requirement today could easily snowball tomorrow; so we got to looking at Optimizely Form actors and the HubSpot API.

And it turns out that half the job of what the multi-thousand-dollar-a-year Marketing Automation Connector does is relatively straight forwards to replicate using the scaffolding that Optimizely have in place around their Forms implementation and the straightforward API implementation that HubSpot has.

With very little configuration (for my money, simpler than the MA connector), we built out an extension to Optimizely Forms that on data submission, makes a request to HubSpot for a form schema, then matches field names from HubSpot to Optimizely before submitting the data to HubSpot once the comparison is completed.

It works alongside all the existing features of Optimizely Forms – so you can continue to hold data in Optimizely if you want to use Visitor Groups/Audiences on the data you’re collecting, you can use the mail functionality to let users know you have their data (assuming you’re not sending that from HubSpot), as well as thank you pages and all the standard and bespoke fields that Optimizely offers. All you have to do is make sure that your Optimizely Form name is the same as your field in HubSpot – simples.

And there’s little reason that the same thing can’t be done with Salesforce, Dynamics and other CRM platforms.

Anyway, it was so simple and easy to use I thought I’d carve it off and make it available for anyone who wanted to send their user data to HubSpot – or extend it to other CRM platforms of their need. So by all means steal, doctor and reuse the code at https://github.com/mattpallatt/MP.OptiForm2HubSpotPush.