I am developing a website lets say a vehicle related site in which we have 3 vehicles
Bicycle
Moterbikes
Cars
On the home page I am displaying one item each (Bicycle, Moterbike, Car). In sitecore I need to use personalization in such a manner if user visited our site previously and he navigated on Bicycles section most, it means user is interested in Bicycles and if he is a anonymous user and if he come to our website again I need to show 3 Bicycles (instead of 1 Bicycle 1 Motorbike and 1 Car) on the home page.
What should I need to do in Sitecore DMS?
Kind Regards,
AP
You can 'personalize' a rendering in the presentation details. Then, using rules you can select whatever rules you want to apply. This then is a condition and you can change the content that needs to be shown.
Example:
In this small default example you see the default situation below, and above it a new condition that shows different content if the rule condition is met. I just selected a default rule, you should probably create one to match your own requirements.
You can find this screen by going to your presentation details, selecting a rendering and clicking 'Personalize' on the right.
or using the Page Editor by selecting a component and clicking 'Personalize component'.
Hope this helps!
As you move into future phases of personalization too you can leverage predictive personalization to continue to tailor the content to that particular user in real-time. If you were to create pattern cards for each of the vehicle types, the visitor would be matched to in real-time to a pattern card and shown the content that's related to that pattern. For example, if a user clicks through a number of bicycle pages and then starts exploring cars the content will update to show more car-related content. This content will continue to shift as the visitor explore more on the site.
Related
I am working on this app where many pages (8+) are linking to the same page. Every page needs to show correct breadcrumb. Since many pages are linking to the same page, the target page (p5) has a number of breadcrumbs and each breadcrumb has a condition that an application item needs to have a specific value for the parent page.
For example pages 1,2,3,4,6,7 link to page 5. So page 5 has 6 separate breadcrumbs on it where the condition is when parent_page = x where x is the parent page number. So if the user comes from page 1, a correct breadcrumb is selected.
I feel that this is excessive and creates a mess. Also the number of pages that link to page 5 seems to grow. I could create new breadcrumbs for each parent page but I feel that this is wrong and want to find a better way. Can anyone point me in the right direction? how have you handled something like this in the past?
I haven't actually done it, but I remember wanting to at one time. I think you would need to "roll your own" breadcrumbs. You could use an APEX collection to keep track of the user's navigation by "pushing" and "popping" pages on to and off of the APEX collection. Then create a SQL-based list region to display these. You may need to create a bespoke list template to make this list look like breadcrumbs.
Had a similar requirement. Many paths to a single location and keeping the breadcrumbs in sync with the users path was a coding horror story. Finally we decided on not going down that road. The breadcrumb now shows the main path back to the main screen, which might not be the exact path the user followed. So, just a single breadcrumb per page. If you want to go back to the previous page then a "back" or "cancel" button could still do that, but not the breadcrumb.
Is there a way to control the order of slides displayed to users in a carousel from the Experience Editor perspective? (or even the Content Editor)
Basically, based on the user that has been identified or not identified, I would like to display a different slide as the first slide of the carousel. All the other slides would still be present, just in a different, specified order.
Is there a way to accomplish this via rules or should I look at having to create separate datasources that have the different slide orders already specified?
TL;DR
Personalization can do three things:
vary a datasource for a rendering
vary a rendering (use another rendering basically)
hide a rendering.
I guess the question you need to answer is whether what you need can be accomplished by doing either one of these actions.
If you've used nested structures to represent your carousel (like we do in SCORE, you can see how it looks like here or here) it's not hard to show/hide certain panels based on personalization conditions and thus reorder the carousel. Depending on how exactly it looks on the published site you may only need to repoint datasources. Either way, it's personalization out of the box and your content structures working nicely together.
If you've used a (variation of a) MultiList field to represent a list of your panels with panels themselves being items somewhere in the shared content area it's not something personalization engine can change based on a condition. Changing a field value is, unfortunately, not on the menu. I am sure you can code around it thanks to Sitecore being so open and flexible but I am not sure you can make it seamless (e.g. variations preview in Page Editor).
Rendering parameters is also not something you can change but if yours are static and defined on the rendering definition item (as opposed to being supplied when component is bound to the placeholder and thus recorded inside the presentation details) you can get away with having two definition items for your carousel component (same code behind it) and picking the right one based on the personalization condition.
Hope it helps.
I am building a brand new website in Sitecore and I am looking for advice on the following scenario:
My site has 2 version of its homepage. Both are quite different. The layout is the same, but most of the components and sublayouts on it will change depending on whether the user is logged in or not.
Does anybody has a suggestion of a good practice, or way to do that in Sitecore? My basic requirements are, have a single URL for both (the website root, it is a homepage) and do not harm the content author experience.
My thought so far was:
Use of personalization to control the components to be displayed (Concerns: performance and the content author experience he woudnt have to change component by component to see both versions)
Use of two item in the tree and intercept a pipeline to resolve the right item at the right time (Concerns: the content author would have two home items to maintain *not actually a big problem)
Does anybody has any other approach or considerations on those I listed?
Thanks
An alternative solution would be to make use of devices, and use a pipeline to switch devices if the user is logged in.
Set up your Device in Sitecore to use the default layout as a fallback so it does not affect other pages in your site (and they continue to work as expected). You are then able to set different sublayouts and components for that Item (directly or in Standard Values for the template) for each device. You can make use the VaryByDevice caching option to make better use of the Cache.
Your content editors can also switch between the devices easily in the Page Editor from the ribbon. Any further customization you need in other areas of the site, such has switching out a single component, can be run using a Personlization Rule taking advantage of "where the current device compares to value".
It does sound like you have the need for personalization based on authenticated status, so I would recommend staying with the built-in personalization interface to avoid confusion. Authors will have been trained during Sitecore training on how to use personalization, and introducing an alternative method for accomplishing the same thing could lead to a less-than-optimal experience for the author.
To address your concern of the author needing to view components by toggling each one, I would recommend installing the Experience Explorer module. You can create presets that meet your rules on your presentation and then the author can preview the site for different 'experiences'.
If you have a single URL for the home page, it is more straight-forward to go with a single item, so I would definitely advise against having two home page items that are being resolved by the same URL.
You mentioned a concern for performance, so I would recommend you making sure that you enable your sublayout caching settings. In your case, varying by Data may be the way to go, given you would personalize with two sets of datasources.
In the past I have used the following crude technique:
Make two components, one for "logged in" and the other for anonymous.
Each rendering has just one line, a single placeholder, either:
<sc:placeholder key="logged-in" runat="server" />
or
<sc:placeholder key="anonymous" runat="server" />
For "logged in" I make a personalisation rule which hides the component if anonymous, and for the anonymous component I make a personalisation rule which hides the component if the user is logged in.
I then nest all the components under the correct placeholder key.
Not fully used personalisaiton yet, so have what I hope is an easy question.
My page is setup where users can use a droplink to pick content for 3 "slots" on the homepage, from a "bucket" of available content items that can appear.
I want to use a "rule" to show different items in each slot, depending on if the rule is met or not, but I can't seem to work out where I set this.
Right now, my page editor view is broken (currently have an open ticket with Sitecore for work out why this is), so I am hoping this can be done from the content editor.
I have already ticked the "Show the Personalization Section" under Application Options.
This sounds like a conditional rendering rule that you're wanting to create. If that is the case, unless you want to apply the rule to ALL renderings (which I wouldn't recommend), you would create the rule under
System -> Marketing Center -> Personalization -> Rules. Here you can set up a conditional rendering rule that will check conditions and then do something. Since this is going to apply to presentation, the actions are limited. Mostly to presentation.
Now to apply that, you go to the layout details on the item or the standard values for the item template. When you click on the rendering (like you would to set a data source), it brings you to the edit screen and you should be able to scroll down to the Personalization section. If your rule is not in the list, then it's most likely in the wrong place. Anyway, if it's there, you simply put a check next to that box and it will now apply that rule when figuring out the layout details when the item is rendered.
I'm developing a Windows Store application based on the Grid application template. Upon creating a new project, there is some sample data generated for the application. There are only three pages in the app: home, grouped items, and item details.
I'm wondering whether it's possible to have different templates for item details, and if so, how.
For instance, I have a group containing a list of smartphones and another group containing a list of printers. In the smartphones item details template, I'd probably have fields such as "Memory card", "Speakerphone", and "Operating system", whereas in the printers item details template I'd have fields such as "Speed", "Accepted cartridges", and "Paper sizes".
How should I go about adding item detail templates and using the correct one depending on which item is viewed? I've looked at http://babaandthepigman.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/datatemplateselector-winrt/ but that seems to be for XAML applications only. I'm not using XAML/VB/C++/C#, but JavaScript and HTML5.
To be clear the three pages in the grid project template are groupedItems (the "hub"), groupDetail (the "section"), and itemDetail (the "detail"). I actually wish they would have named those pages "hub", "section", and "detail".
If you're talking about having multiple item templates so that item tiles on the hub (groupedItems) page look different depending on the item type, then the easiest way is to provide the multiple item templates (WinJS.Binding.Template) in the HTML and then write a custom template selection function. It's not that difficult. You can see an example if you look at my codeSHOW app (codeshow.codeplex.com)... see the home.js page. The source is online, so you can see that page here.
If you're talking about having multiple detail (itemDetail) pages so that when a user clicks on a certain item from the hub, they might be taken to a whole page of information about a phone versus a printer, then that's simply a matter of having multiple pages and being intelligent about which page you navigate to. If the user clicks on a phone from the hub, then you navigate to /pages/phone/phone.html. If they click on a printer then you navigate to /pages/printer/printer.html.
Finally, if your entities (i.e. phones and printers) are similar enough, then you may want to keep a single page to represent them, and just make that page smart enough to modify its template for the right item. In that case, you can create two templates on the page (WinJS.Binding.Template again) and when the entity is passed in to the page (the 'options' part of ready(element,options)), you just inspect it and look at the entity type (i.e. phone or printer) and then render the data into the right template. The Binding and Templating and Fragments and Pages demos on codeSHOW may be helpful there.
If you want more help, you can schedule some 1 on 1 time with a Microsoft Developer Evangelist at usdpe.ohours.org. Have fun!