Optimizely London Dev Meetup 10th July 2025
Overview & Agenda
As 2025 rolled around this year it was time for another one of our much beloved developer meetups in London.
This year, I took us back to the Lightwell in London https://www.techspace.co/locations/worship-street/events as last year's dev meetup had been so successful. So with eager eyes and much excitement Niteco UK took to London to host this years events.
A a great bonus this year we had a great UK Niteco team roster with the additions of Jill George as our Senior Sales and Client Director in the UK and Polly Walton joining as Director of Growth and Innovation (and Platinum OMVP) along side Mark, Jacob and Myself.
For the lineup we had a range of amazing speakers from agency's and OMVPs and Optimizely
18:30 – 18:50 :: Minesh Shah (Netcel) - Frontend Hosting With Optimizely
18:55 - 19:15 :: Tom Bramley (Optimizely) - Content Manager, AI translations, Opal and CMS 13
19:20 - 19:40 :: Scott Reed (Niteco) - Application Insights, Refining Data and View Logs
20:10 - 20:30 :: Andrew Markham (UNRVLD) - Introduction to the new Opti Connect Platform
20:35 - 20:55 :: Jacob Pretorius (Niteco) – Edge Logs
21:00 - 21:20 :: Daniel Halse (Netcel) - Graph Integration with Configured Commerce
21:25 - 21:45 :: Jeremey Brown (UNRVLD) - Laying the Foundation: PaaS CMS for Greenfield Projects
Here is my round up of the different talks which can be reviewed @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg and thanks to the excellent Jacob Pretorius who is not only an OMVP but a master of video recording and kindly recorded all the sessions for us :-) !!!
Minesh Shah (Netcel) - Frontend Hosting With Optimizely
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg&t=76s
Minesh from Netcel is a long time speaker, OMVP and friend and as per usual kicking us off with an exciting talk on another new beta/platform feature. For this talk we would be delving in to the new Optimizely Frontend Beta offered as a new hosting option to the head when working with Optimizely.
Key takeaways from this talk for me were
- https://www.optimizely.com/beta/ the place to get all the latest cutting edge features
- Optimizely now provides an Azure based hosting platform for the CMS hosting as apposed to needing services like Vecel or Netlify therefore keeping the service all within Optimizely
- The same great features such as the PaaS portal and WAF/CDN with Cloudflare come as part of it
- Deploy using the same Deployment API we use for CMS 12
- Does not compile the solution just deploys the packaged code
Tom Bramley (Optimizely) - Content Manager, AI translations, Opal and CMS 13
From Optimizely for a second year in a row we had the amazing Tom Bramley joining this year to talk all things CMS and AI. I was very excited for some of these updates especially around CMS 13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg&t=1248s
- Visual Builder will be even better that expected and is coming early 2026 with a pre released in Q4 with full documentation
- Opal will have a range of new features for CMS PaaS content creation with more information coming soon
- New graph improvements to match some of the missing Search and Navigation functions which is very cool
- Embedded DAM for SaaS and for PaaS will become the future replacing the standard Asset system
- Content Manager allows management of content outside of just page structures with a robust editing platform. Very much feels like the labs addon https://github.com/episerver/episerver-labs-content-manager-docs coming to the main product
- Frontend Beta and Optimizely Connect Platform are exciting new featues (covered in other talks in this blog)
Below are core details on the public available CMS 13 release as it was discussed in Tom's talk!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gKlHbnapUNQFuQYZgwgE6lhg54GMLHjI/view?usp=sharing
Scott Reed (Niteco): Application Insights, Refining Data and View Logs
For my talk I wanted to go over the core features of Application Insights and how to debug issues to allow developers to fully make use of their toolbox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg&t=2329s
My core aims on this talk are that developers should understand application insights and it's core parts.
- Application Map for dependency and error investigation
- Performance, Failure, Metrics and KQL for investigating sources of errors and performance problems
- Missing features and things I'd like
For investigating errors and service problems follow https://world.optimizely.com/blogs/scott-reed/dates/2025/4/identifying-spike-requests-and-issues-in-application-insights/ which covers the points discussed in my talk and below is my full presentation
Andrew Markham (UNRVLD) - Introduction to the new Opti Connect Platform
We welcomed back multiple speaker and long time friend Andy back today to talk about the new Opti Connect Platform. This feature is basically the apps feature from ODP split out and enhanced with new features to allow for seamless CMS integration with other platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg&t=3624s
This is a very exciting feature for me and comes with a number of cool areas I want to explore more
- Free and paid tiers (paid has a database for data storage and private apps)
- Realtime sync mode or database driven scheduler service powers the platform
- Many apps being built or the ability to create private apps for your client/organization
- Direct integrations for SaaS CMS and PaaS to allow external content in the CMS
Jacob Pretorius (Niteco) – Edge Logs
My friend and fellow Niteco OMVP Jacob today was covering all things Edge Logs, allowing us to take use of the amazing data we have from Cloudflare and another beta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg&t=5157s
The Edge logs feature is a very powerful dataset from Cloudflare and really helps us to see where challenges, bots and decisions were made by cloudflare and the traffic stats of real users vs non real. Using Grafana we can pull all of this information down and create rich and power dashboards so we can explore it and see exactly what we need. Sign up here https://www.optimizely.com/beta-signup/
Below is Jacob's full presentation for your viewing and download below
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OulYCNskMwCeEWe5uK2yw3iONyvgjb5N/view?usp=sharing
And his blog on the subject here https://world.optimizely.com/blogs/jacob-pretorius/dates/2025/4/visualise-cloudflare-edge-logs-with-grafana/
Daniel Halse (Netcel): CMS 12 / Graph Integration with Configured Commerce
Today for Daniel's talk he covered connecting CMS 12 and Configured commerce together so that clients get the great and amazing features of CMS 12 editing with the robust and powerful B2B commerce features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg&t=5807s
Key thoughts for me on this are
- We can connect these products to give the best of both worlds
- Routing is not easy in spire and need some creating development to get it working
- Graph is great for powering the integration between products
- Spire is limited in CMS capibilities
- Security locks down a number of features due to restrictions in the platform around code and packages for Spire
Jeremy Brown (UNRVLD): PaaS CMS Foundation for Greenfield Projects
Jeremy joined us for the first time giving a great talk on the fundamentals of creating a CMS 12 project from scratch and the core areas to be aware of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqtleljncDg&t=6988s
- Implement core properties for your common page types for best practices such as SEO/GEO/Graph
- Use the off the shelf open source nuget packages to save a lot of time
- Understand core configuration such as redirects, security and sign on options such as Opti ID
- Be familar with the DXP configuration and go live process for CMS 12
Conclusion
We have a great speaker set this year covering a range of topics and as per usual it was all about community and coming together to make Optimizely the best platform it can be. Find more about how great our community was from my friend and boss Mark Welland (Executive Vice President of Niteco) here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/optimizely-developer-meet-up-non-techies-mark-welland-fp0ie/?trackingId=GrCWnv%2BHRs6wPgYBW8Ku9Q%3D%3D
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