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.

Sitecore Search - Part 1 - Introduction

Using a search-based approach instead of native APIs is a great way to improve the experience users have with your Sitecore application, for performance and usability, among other reasons. LINQ to Provider is the search API piece of LINQ to Sitecore that allows you to develop search-centered solutions in Sitecore.

LINQ to Provider uses a LINQ query syntax to abstract your code, and focus, from the provider specific query parser. As a developer, this means flexibility and efficiency, since you can write some search code for a Lucene based search project, and move that code to a SOLR based project with little modification. And you don’t have to construct provider specific queries yourself.