Configuring personalization

This topic describes how to configure settings for personalization features when using visitor groups.

In this topic

• Proving access for editors to visitor groups
• Enabling a Geolocation provider
• Utilizing geographic location provided by a CDN

Providing access for editors to visitor groups

To access Visitor Groups in the global menu, you must be a member of the CmsAdmins or VisitorGroupAdmins access groups, otherwise you are prompted to a login page. If you want editors to add, edit, and delete visitor groups, you can provide access by adding them to VisitorGroupAdmins (CmsAdmins and CmsEditors are already defined in the configuration). The following example shows how to configure access for editors with the Mapped virtualRoles in the appsettings.json file:

{
 "EpiServer": {
   "Cms": {
     "MappedRoles": {
       "Items": {
         "VisitorGroupAdmins": {
           "MappedRoles": [ "WebEditors" ],
           "ShouldMatchAll": "false"
          }
       }
     }    
   }
 }
}

Enabling a Geolocation provider

Note: As of version 11.4.0 of the Optimizely CMS Visual Studio extension, new CMS projects will no longer be created with a Geolocation provider configured. The Geolocation provider that has been shipped with CMS will also be removed in a future release as the MaxMind GeoLite database it depends on has been deprecated.

You can enable geographic location based visitor groups by configuring a Geolocation provider service. Optimizely supplies a provider for the free GeoLite2 database from MaxMind through an optional NuGet package named EPiServer.Personalization.MaxMindGeolocation. The GeoLite2 Geolocation database can be downloaded from MaxMind’s website. New versions of this database are released regularly as the information is continuously updated.

The provider requires both the IP lookup database (.mmdb) and the accompanying locations database (.csv) to be able to serve an updated list of locations. The location of these files must be specified in your configuration such as:

You can configure the provider by IServiceCollection interface in the startup.cs.

public class Startup
{
    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)  
    {
         services.AddMaxMindGeolocationProvider("path\to\GeoLite2-City.mmdb", "path\to\GeoLite2-City-Locations-en.csv");
    }
}

Note that Continent and Country names are localized using the usual localization in CMS while Regions are loaded directly from the Locations file.

Utilizing geographic location provided by a CDN

Optimizely CMS also provides an option for retrieving Geolocation from the current request, when provided from the CDN in the form of a request header. This option is only used in cases where no dedicated Geolocation provider is configured and only supports Continent and Country locations. See Content Delivery Network (CDN) Configuration for additional information on how to enable this option.

Last updated: Jul 02, 2021