Fed up of trying to your Contact in 100,000s of Contacts in xDB when you only want see if some data is there. Yeah me too. Here are the easiest way to find your Contacts.
Tutorial
Sitecore Publishing Service – Setting up 8.2s new Publishing option
Sitecore 8.2 has been released and it brings a new option for publishing Sitecore Items – Sitecore Publishing Service. This is a feature that my brother Mike Robbins worked on and been so tight lipped about, so it only makes sense for me to dig in to see what it’s all about.
Gated Content Sitecore Module
Quite a few of the clients I have worked with lately have asked about implementing Gated Content. Not Gated Pages – preventing access to pages requiring an account and roles but gated areas on an actual page. Essentially requiring a site visitor to give up some information about themselves before gaining access to some content.
This actually a good thing in Sitecore because we can request the visitor’s email address so that we can identify them in xDB. Meaning more and more of our Site visitors will be uniquely identified, tracked and ultimately targeted with personalised experiences.
Extending Sitecore’s Experience Profile – The Pipelines
Part 1 – ExperienceProfileContactViews Pipeline
I’ve been writing this series on Sitecore xDB, Contacts and the Experience Profile for a while now. I’ve been covering how to identify Contacts for Sitecore’s Experience Database (xDB) and how to extend xDB so it can hold custom data.
This time I’m going to explain how to surface that useful BIG DATA you extended xDB to hold so that it is accessible to Content Editors. This is a large topic so I’ll be splitting it between two posts, this first part will focus on the ExperienceProfileContactViewsPipeline which retrieves the data in a format that the Experience Profile can use.
It’s worth noting that I figured most of this out by just jumping into it, decompiling code and a reasonable amount trial and error. Just take that into consideration 🙂
How to Identify and Merge Contacts in Sitecore xDB
In my previous post I explained how to extend Sitecore’s Experience Database so that you can store custom data against each Contact (visitor) of your site. I also recently posted about updating an xDB Contact with basic information. This post will explain how to uniquely identify Contacts from one another and how to merge Contacts, and their data, once you have determined that they are the same User. Continue reading
How to Update Contacts in Sitecore xDB
This is a quick, short and sharp post covering how to add data to Contacts in xDB, specifically to the Facets and Elements that come with Sitecore out-of-the-box. This post is to provide additional info to that goes with recent posts covering how to identify and merge Contacts in xDB and how to extend xDB to store custom data.
How to extend Sitecore’s Experience Database
It’s about time we start doing with Experience Database. Out of the box, xDB is awesome for collecting general data such as name, address, contact details etc and that’s really useful. But how about we take it to another level; store specific information to the website, the client and the interactions of the visitor.
Sitecore Webforms for Marketers – Custom Field Validator MIME Type Sniffer
Update: I have since released this as a Sitecore Marketplace Module for download. Improvements I have made and the full source code are available in this recent blog post
MIME Type Custom Form Validator
I was recently working on methods to validate files uploaded by End Users and the usual recommendation of checking the file extension didn’t sit right with me, even more so when I found out that the .NET API ultimately just checks the File extension as well.
So the product a mornings work I’ve written a decent method of checking those upload files are what they say they are. In this case I created a Custom Sitecore WFFM Field Validator but its simple enough to port the code to custom web forms. Hopefully another dev will find this suitable as an alternative method.
Quick Start Guide: Dynamic Content via Sitecore Personalization
Sitecore Personalisation – Automatically changing content
In the previous post I covered how to get personalization working correctly for your site. Now its time to start doing something exciting.
With Personalization working the next step is to structure your content so that it is in the form of reusable blocks and develop Sitecore sublayouts to dynamically display these blocks of content.
In this post I’ll go over the basics to achieve this and get you giving personalised experiences like a pro.
Quick Start Guide: Sitecore Personalisation Getting it working
Sitecore Personalisation – Getting it working
I’ve been browsing around Sitecore forums and resources and there are often devs posting about Personalization not working working for their site or how to customise their site in a given scenario.
The thing is the former is fairly straight forward with a little guidance and the latter can be achieved with some knowledge and examples. Therefore I thought I’d help the community out by posting a short series of Quick Start Guides on everything from getting Personalization working to dynamically changing content and altering the site based on conditions.
I’ll start with everything that you need to do to get Personalization working in your site.
Exercising Sitecore 