Technology, Opinion and a side of Optimizely
I was lucky enough to participate in the latest UK GiveCamp over the course of the last weekend.
As programmers, we’re very used to dealing with systems that are easy to understand and behave predictably (though I have worked with some codebases that are the exact opposite).
By default Powershell exceptions and stderr outputs don’t give you much information beyond the exception name and the position in the script where the exception occurred. What you really want is a full stack trace.
Last week I blogged about the Fortune Cookie Personalization Engine for EPiServer (CMS6 R2), which I’ve released as an open source project on codeplex and it’s also available on the EPiServer Nuget feed. The overriding idea of the PersonalizationEngine is to provide a more automated way of serving personalized content, by matching up a Visitor Group with a means of providing EPiServer content (PageData) that is relevant to that group. This time I’m going to run through how as a developer you can create your own ContentProviders for use with the PersonalizationEngine.
By now you’ll have heard a lot about the new Personalization / Visitor Group functionality in EPiServer CMS 6 R2, and with good reason. Not only is there an extensible framework for developers to add their own Visitor Group matching criteria, there is a understandable user interface for editors and the whole concept definitely fits in with current expectations of “today’s web”.