ContentArea with Groups of Personalized Content

Personalization is a powerful component in Episerver that can provide a cool, fresh, and tailored experience for users that visit your site. Leveraging different criteria and conditions in Epi, Visitor Groups provide a grouping mechanism for users to be served different content based on pages they've viewed, forms they've submitted, or campaigns they have arrived from, among various other criteria. It's a pretty nice piece of functionality that, if you haven't learned about yet, you should check out more about, here.

That said, Personalized Groups in Episerver serve content on a prioritized, top-down, first-match basis. That means a visitor is served the first matching content item that is tagged with a visitor group they're in. That also means you are limited to one piece of changing content per Personalized Group for a user. But I needed more, and here are the solutions I explored.

Rendering Options for DateTime (and other) Properties in Episerver

The question has been brought up to me more than a couple times in the past few weeks about how to properly format a DateTime property in a View and still allow In-Page Editing to work. Since I have answered it with mostly the same information each time it has come up, I figured it was time to put something out in cyberspace that I can point people to, or even help them find when the situation arises.

I am a huge fan of In-Page Editing in Episerver, and part of my goal when teaching people techniques working with Epi is to keep that In-Page Editing experience in place for users and editors so they can get the most enjoyable experience out of their site and CMS.

The nice thing about the approaches in this article is that while the article is centered around the DateTime property, most of these techniques apply to any property where you need to display something different than the actual property value.

Ultimately, then, this article is about the various techniques to render a property in a view while keeping the In-Page Editor working. I'm just using a DateTime property as an example.