Blog posts by Not Another Developer Blog

Blog posts by Not Another Developer Blog2026-02-27T17:54:32.0000000Zhttps://world.optimizely.com/blogs/not-another-developer-blog/ Optimizely World Unstoppable: Insights from Optimizely’s 2026 UK Partner dayOver 150 Optimizely partners met in Shoreditch for the 2026 London Partner Kick Off. The theme was very much Opal with a side order of Optimizely's Simon Chapman bringing the "sexy back" to (the forthcoming) CMS 13. Here's my 5 hot takes from the event: <img src="/link/2937abdee9af455bb62769f63d4bcd51.aspx" /> 1. Opal is No Longer Your Assistant. It’s Your New Co-worker The most fundamental shift in the 2026 roadmap is the transition of Opal from a "sidekick" into a fully integrated "co-worker." We are moving beyond simple prompt-based AI and into the era of Agent Orchestration. These are autonomous workflows where agents, triggered by events or schedules, handle end-to-end tasks without constant human prodding. As Optimizely CIO Peter Yeung put it: "Opal's not like a sidekick anymore; it's not your buddy. This is your co-worker who really helps you at every stage of what you do." This agentic shift represents the "third rising tide" of technology, on par with the arrival of the internet and the explosion of smartphones. It allows your team to move from manual execution to a state of continuous, automated growth. <img src="/link/b5c7f62d2ef543ce81115af6640cbf58.aspx" /> 2. CMS 13 is Making the Agentic CMS Mandatory Optimizely is reinventing its flagship product with CMS 13 and the technical bedrock is shifting. The philosophy is now "CMS Core," where features are built once to serve both SaaS and PaaS users simultaneously. With this update comes some significant steps forward. Key insider details for the CMS 13 rollout include: <ul> <li>The Technical Foundation: Full support for .NET 10 and the implementation of Opti ID for centralised reporting, user rights, and audit trails.</li> <li>The Power of Graph: Transitioning to Optimizely Graph is no longer optional. It is the mandatory engine for semantic search and AI-driven content delivery.</li> <li>Visual Builder: To keep marketers "in the flow," the new Visual Builder provides interactive previews and drag-and-drop orchestration, officially sunsetting the Dojo interface.</li> <li>SaaS "Growing Up": Optimizely is bridging the gap for enterprise-grade requirements by allowing SaaS to connect to any external source, PIMs, ERPs, CommerceTools, or Bynder via the Optimizely Connect Platform (OCP).</li> </ul> 3. The 'Crawl-to-Refer' Metric. Why SEO is Evolving into GEO In 2026, marketing is no longer just about attracting human clicks. It’s a battleground on two-fronts between human engagement and how AI agents "read" your value. This is the era of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). As Mark Wakelin, Optimizely's Global Director of Value Consulting, said the roadmap revealed a vital new benchmark. Customers using GDO (Generative Discovery Optimisation) agents have seen a 44% increase in the crawl-to-refer ratio from LLMs. This metric is the difference between an AI 'scraping' your data to answer a query on its own platform and that AI 'referring' a human visitor to your site to complete a transaction. To navigate this, the GEO Recommendations Agent is now a roadmap priority. This tool audits your site for AI-readiness, identifying how well your content performs for search topics and generative schemas and can even auto-generate the .llms.txt files required for modern AI discovery. 4. The Secret Weapon for Devs. Production-Ready Code from Figma The friction between marketing requests and developer capacity has long been a bottleneck in MarTech. CMS 13 addresses this with the Front-end Component Generator Agent. This isn't just a code-snippet tool. It allows developers to pull information directly out of Figma frames to automatically create React components and content structures. The workflow is a structural change to the DevOps lifecycle. Agents generate production-ready code and push it directly to GitHub for review. By reducing development cycles from weeks to minutes, organisations can finally achieve true speed-to-market. <img src="/link/47ea195a49354a83b156a9366df9ffa6.aspx" /> 5. Transforming the Economics of Growth with Proven ROI AI is not about replacing people. It’s about reclaiming time. The 10,000+ hours of GEO-optimisation backlog that many enterprise teams currently face but can never hope to clear. The 2026 strategy focuses on transforming these economics of growth by enabling teams to deliver more value with fewer constraints. The data from the 2025 AI Benchmark Report and the New Content Operating Model provide the hard evidence for this shift: <ul> <li>+78.66% in created experiments.</li> <li>-53.75% in time per campaign.</li> <li>+26% in content engagement.</li> <li>+9.26% in win rates for experimentation teams.</li> <li>+44% increase in the Crawl-to-Refer ratio.</li> </ul> By using agentic workflows to handle the heavy lifting. The compliance checks, metadata tagging, and reporting teams can finally reclaim their time for the creative tasks they were actually hired for. <img src="/link/15fddedf3b5b4106b70fe3dfe83a8c55.aspx" /> Conclusion: The Rising Tide of 2026 As we enter this third rising tide of technology, the roadmap is set and the agentic ecosystem is ready. Is your team steering their AI program into the safe passage of open water or onto the rocky shoreline? To join the unstoppable journey, now is the time to get certified and specialised in the agentic future.2026-02-27T17:54:32.0000000Z

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Optimizely Developer Meet-up (for Non-Techies)<img src="/link/845a988e3d3c4703a13dfd5f2a9afde1.aspx" alt="" width="1000" height="600" /> I’ve been part of the Optimizely community for over seven years. Back when Episerver was still just “Epi”, Optimizely was the best A/B testing platform on the market, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinanovick/">Justin Anovick</a> was beginning to rock those legendary branded suits. What’s always drawn me in is the strength of the community. Customers, partners, and “Optimizers” (my collective noun for anyone on the Optimizely payroll) make up a network that’s as welcoming as it is knowledgeable. Nothing captures that spirit better than the local developer meetups organised around the world by passionate volunteers, backed by Optimizely itself. Last Thursday, I attended my fifth developer meet-up in London. “But hang on,” I hear you say. “You’re not a developer!” And you'd be right. I’m not. But whilst I might not be able to debug a stack trace, I know when someone’s about to deploy a strong opinion in a stand-up! And I do love attending these meet-ups. Here’s why… In a word: community. It’s a room full of people far more knowledgeable than me. People who are knee deep in the weeds of the Optimizely stack every day. People solving real customer challenges and pushing the limits of the platform. But more than that, people who want to share what they’ve learned and are incredibly generous with their time doing it. It’s infectious, being in a space like that, surrounded by smart, normal people who just want to help each other, is a special thing. You can’t manufacture it. You can only enable it, and hope that it grows organically through genuine passion. In my career, I've seen similar communities, particularly at larger organisations, but this one, this Optimizely one, really stands out. This particular evening ran for over two hours and featured seven speakers. Now, I won’t pretend I followed everything, but even a simpleton like me walked away with new insights. It was fascinating to see how different people and partners are using the Optimizely One suite to create real value for their customers, across CMS, Commerce, and beyond. <figure class="image"><img src="/link/92c7d97994384d88b3865ea45f08c801.aspx" alt="" width="1000" height="750" /> <figcaption>Tom Bramley adding the 'Premium' to DXP</figcaption> </figure>   If you’ve never been to one of these meet-ups, I genuinely recommend giving it a go. They’re free to attend, they’re informal and they’re packed with knowledge. Sure, if you’re a developer, tech lead, or solution architect, you’ll be right in the thick of it—but even if you’re not, you’ll get plenty out of it too and you’ll meet some brilliant people along the way. This one was co-sponsored by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/niteco/">Niteco</a> , <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/unrvld/">UNRVLD</a> , <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/netcel/">Netcel</a> , and Optimizely. No big deal, but together they helped secure a great venue (with food and drink!) and kept the event free for everyone to enjoy. If you’re part of this community, come along. Listen. Speak. Share. They’re a friendly bunch (especially once they're fed). A final note of kudos to <a href="/link/443d0266b0d74fe4af8eb8fe5bc42e82.aspx">Scott Reed</a>, who’s been helping organise the London meet-up since 2017. Thanks also to <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/optimizers/patrick-lam/">Patrick Lam</a>, <a href="/link/d3a4329f4f3d4ab395e00840f4583179.aspx">Satata Satez</a>, and everyone who helped make it happen. And of course, huge respect to the speakers: <ul style="direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed; margin-top: 0in; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <li style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; vertical-align: middle; color: #0a66c2;"><a href="/link/1658d274cf7e488d898572455e4d55ab.aspx">Minesh Shah</a> (Netcel): Frontend Hosting with Optimizely</li> <li style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; vertical-align: middle; color: #0a66c2;"><a href="https://www.optimizely.com/optimizers/tom-bramley/">Tom Bramley</a> (Optimizely): Content Manager, AI Translations, Opal and CMS 13</li> <li style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; vertical-align: middle; color: #0a66c2;"><a href="/link/443d0266b0d74fe4af8eb8fe5bc42e82.aspx">Scott Reed</a> (Niteco): Application Insights, Refining Data and View Logs</li> <li style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; vertical-align: middle; color: #0a66c2;"><a href="/link/20a68f2bb9f24f04abec9ebfced18fc6.aspx">Andrew Markham</a> (UNRVLD): Intro to the New Opti Connect Platform</li> <li style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; vertical-align: middle; color: #0a66c2;"><a href="/link/cefc77355e1e41bb93bc66b768c2333b.aspx">Jacob Pretorius</a> (Niteco): Visualising Cloudflare Edge Logs with Grafana</li> <li style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; vertical-align: middle; color: #0a66c2;"><a href="/link/706b5d6bd3c14e6582db84303c47f14c.aspx">Daniel Halse</a> (Netcel): CMS 12 / Graph Integration with Configured Commerce</li> <li style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 6pt; vertical-align: middle; color: #0a66c2;"><a href="/link/c17f09ae041b42f5bf8a48805271650c.aspx">Jeremy Brown</a> (UNRVLD): PaaS CMS Foundation for Greenfield Projects</li> </ul>   <figure class="image"><img src="/link/2ab9b077dc5c4d83b599786b6134d228.aspx" alt="" width="1000" height="786" /> <figcaption>Jacob Pretorius - When is a log not a log? When it's an Edge log!</figcaption> </figure>   And a final thank you to <a href="/link/cefc77355e1e41bb93bc66b768c2333b.aspx">Jacob Pretorius</a>, not just for speaking, but for filming the whole evening so that you can watch it all back from the comfort of your own home. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg</a> I don’t refactor code. I refactor pitch decks: same mental energy, just fewer curly braces. Hope to see you at the next one!2025-07-14T19:42:17.0000000Z

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