Blog posts by Nicola Ayan2023-07-14T08:23:55.0000000Zhttps://world.optimizely.com/blogs/nicola-ayan/ Optimizely World Optimizely and Hubspot integration use casesToday, Gautam Bawa, one of our customer success managers asked, “What integrations does Optimizely have with Hubspot?” Well, it depends on whether we are talking about a CMS, a CRM, or a CDP! There’s quite a few use cases, so I’ve decided to compile a list that customers can unlock by integrating Optimizely and Hubspot. […]2023-07-14T08:23:55.0000000ZBlog post Does Optimizely CMS come with a native app development framework?A customer success manager asked me this question today, and so I’d like to create quick blogpost on this for everyone else asking. Short answer: Not out of the box, but you can leverage open-source mobile app frameworks, thanks to our new GraphQL offering. See below to find out more. Long answer: Optimizely fully supports […]2023-06-14T01:00:29.0000000ZBlog post Inconsistent cart behaviour in a load-balanced websiteProblem One of the websites we’re looking after is an e-Commerce website running on 5 web servers, load balanced in AWS with sticky sessions enabled, with the following architecture (simplified): There’s several issues with running sticky sessions in an e-Commerce website. One of them is the inevitable customer losing his/her session when one web server […]2020-05-01T15:48:00.0000000ZBlog post How to exclude shortcuts / redirects from the search results in EpiserverHave you set up shortcuts / redirects for some of your pages in Episerver that you are now seeing duplicate results in your site search? One is the correct page and the other is the shortcut page? There are several approaches to exclude shortcuts / redirects from your search results: Do not send these pages […]2020-04-04T14:41:00.0000000ZBlog post How to move an Episerver category under anotherEver needed to move an Episerver Category under another? I could not find a way to do this in the UI so I had to it the old-fashioned way of jumping straight to the database. Warning: You’re not supposed to change data against CMS databases directly as you can easily break sh*t. If you’re in […]2020-04-01T14:34:00.0000000ZBlog post A Chat with Alex about the Common Pitfalls in Digital projectsDuring the Episerver Ascend APAC 2020 here in Sydney, we did a presentation about “Avoiding common pitfalls to future-proof your next project“, where we went through 5 common issues that shorten the lifespan of CMS and e-Commerce sites based on our experience. As a follow up, we got the chance to chat with the new Episerver CEO, […]2020-03-30T14:21:00.0000000ZBlog post How to make the most of Episerver FindI’ve recently encountered a few clients who have been using Find for quite a few years now and while the search and filters are working, they are not using much of its optimisation functions. So I’ve decided to write this post to go through out-of-the-box (OOTB) optimisation features of Epi Find, and show sample implementations […]2020-02-04T12:13:32.0000000ZBlog post How to make the most of Episerver FindI’ve recently encountered a few clients who have been using Find for quite a few years now and while the search and filters are working, they are not using much of its optimisation functions. So I’ve decided to write this post to go through out-of-the-box (OOTB) optimisation features of Epi Find, and show sample implementations […]2020-02-04T12:13:32.0000000ZBlog post My Episerver Ascend 2019 NotesMy original post was published in the Niteco website but I’ve decided to also add it here in my own blog. This is a 5-min read, which hopefully helps those who have missed the conference. CMS Updates There have been several updates made to the CMS lately, and here’s my favorite: enhancements to block editing […]2020-01-05T10:30:09.0000000ZBlog post How to localise your 404 custom error page in EpiserverI feel like there is a better / easier way of doing this but I couldn’t find a resource online that works (and there isn’t much I could find at the time of writing). So I’m sharing this post as an option that works, incase you haven’t found a better solution. For those who have […]2018-11-17T06:33:35.0000000ZBlog post A simple editable robots.txt in EpiserverThis post will show you how you can easily author a robots.txt content for your Episerver site. Step 1: Add a CMS property “Robots.txt” In my case, I added this property to my StartPage [Display( Name = "Robots.txt", GroupName = Groups.MetaData, Order = 835)] [UIHint(UIHint.Textarea)] public virtual string RobotsTxt { get; set; } Step 2: Create […]2018-11-14T15:40:36.0000000ZBlog post Episerver Forms – Cannot set property ‘$workingForm’ of undefinedThis took me a little while to figure out and there isn’t any helpful resource online at the time of writing (according to Google anyway) regarding this error so I think this deserves a blog post… Problem I am on Episerver.Forms 4.18.0 and I’ve been getting this error on my browser console intermittently. Sometimes it […]2018-10-24T15:38:09.0000000ZBlog post Expose FontAwesome icons to the Episerver rich text editor (TinyMCE)For those who need to expose font icons to your Episerver rich text editor, the below might help… My plugin uses FontAwesome 5.3.1. The code is on Github. References that helped direct me to this solution: Josh18 (TinyMCE for Joomla) – https://github.com/josh18/TinyMCE-FontAwesome-Plugin FortAwesome (ofcourse) – https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/blob/master/advanced-options/metadata/icons.yml TinyMCE doco – https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/  2018-10-22T15:31:11.0000000ZBlog post Episerver – dynamically populate a second dropdown based on firstHow do I link two dropdown fields in Episerver such that the values of a dropdown are based on the selected value of another? Solution: (Please note this post only applies to those who are using Episerver Forms.) Use the existing Episerver form field “Selection” for the first dropdown Expose a new dropdown field (i.e. […]2018-09-11T19:05:04.0000000ZBlog post Episerver CMS Audit NuGet packageIn my last Episerver post, I talked about a tool that provides visualisation on how content types are used across multiple sites. I finally got the chance to package it up and make available as a NuGet package. I haven’t published it in any feed as I’m not sure how stable it is so please use […]2018-05-28T14:50:43.0000000ZBlog post Growing Episerver DXC instance? You might want a tool like this…I’ve recently just started working with a new client who has an existing Episerver DXC implementation with about 16 sites (12 live, 4 underway). I was quite overwhelmed with the number of content types in their solution: 65 page types and about 130 block types. Below is an architecture diagram of just page types. When […]2018-05-21T18:44:28.0000000ZBlog post Episerver – HtmlHelper does not contain a definition for ShellInitializationScriptIf you have tried extending the navigation of Episerver and implemented a custom module with its own view and got the following errors: ‘System Web WebPages Html HtmlHelper’ does not contain a definition for ‘ShellInitializationScript’ and the best extension method overload ‘EPiServer Shell Web Mvc Html ScriptExtensions ShellInitializationScript( System Web Mvc HtmlHelper)’ has some invalid […]2018-05-14T14:33:49.0000000ZBlog post Episerver Upgrade – Search Breaking changesI’ve had to recently upgrade an episerver website from 8.9 to 11 and stumbled on a few breaking changes which were pretty straight-forward to fix. However, the entire SearchService.cs class had a lot of errors after the upgrade and it no longer knows about the classes that belong to EPiServer.Search.Queries. Turns out everything related to […]2018-05-12T15:28:25.0000000ZBlog post Episerver Alloy – Could not open new database – File activation failureSomeone asked me today how to fix this error that he encountered after creating a new Episerver MVC project with the Alloy Template. I remember seeing this before myself and so I’m putting up a post for those out there who encounter the same problem. Server Error in ‘/’ Application. Could not open new database ‘EPiServerDB’. […]2018-05-01T14:22:46.0000000ZBlog post Episerver Insight and the Profile Store – Basic ImplementationA couple of weeks ago, I got the chance play with Episerver Insight on a local epi installation. It was very quick to setup, and tracking can be easily customised. Before I go into detail on how to set it up, here’s a quick overview of what it is and what it’s not. What is […]2018-04-27T16:00:03.0000000ZBlog post