Hide FormContainerBlock in Optimizely

It's easy to customize a FormContainerBlock by creating a new one inheriting from the out-of-box FormContainerBlock model. When doing this you gain the option of using the OOB container, or your new custom one. However, I have encountered numerous times when the OOB form container was no longer necessary for the project. Furthermore, attempting to use the OOB FormContainerBlock in certain areas created issues I had to account for. In several instances for me, the easiest approach was to hide the Optimizely FormContainerBlock from editors, and this is how I did it.

Optimizely Form Events using an Interface Pattern

Much like standard content items in Optimizely CMS, Forms trigger events that can be subscribed to for further customization. You typically subscribe to these events by employing an Initialization Module and attaching an event handler to process the logic you need for each event. This works well for the out-of-the-box Forms, but I have done enough customization of forms that I started employing an Interface pattern to clean it up. I use this same pattern for content events, so I thought I would share my forms approach. 

Working with SyntaxHighlighter in Blogger Simplified - Updated

I’ve been attempting to clean up my blog and make it a little more user friendly for myself and visitors, and given that it’s a blog by a developer there is bound to be a code sample or two posted on it. When I see a code sample on a site I like to be able to scroll the code block to see the full thing, or highlight sections to copy if I like. Needless to say, it’s important to display code samples properly on a blog for coding.

When I was first throwing this blog together I searched for the best approach to displaying code samples. Some people were using SyntaxHighlighter with some tweaks and troubles here and there; others said the simplest approach was to just create a GitHub Gist and copy the Gist embed URL into your post. The Gist approach seemed the simplest so I decided to go with that to start. Well, now that I tackled that with all the effort it took (none, seriously) I decided to try my hand at SyntaxHighlighter.

Stop Creating New Windows & Tabs When Debugging

By default, Visual Studio launches web applications in a new browser window when debugging. It also closes your browser window when you stop. While I prefer publishing my web applications locally, Optimizely runs well from Visual Studio, and it's easier to debug initialization modules and other items this way. However, when you want to leave the page or content open, this behaviour can get in the way. This is how you change that.

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.

Content and Growth are the Focus at Episerver Ascend 2019

Each year Episerver organizes the Ascend conference to showcase achievements and accomplishments for the product, the company, and the community. They also layout their roadmap for the future. Each day kicks off with a keynote that is usually intriguing, thought-provoking, or inspirational. A series of breakout sessions, developer labs, and networking opportunities follow. It's a great way for developers, partners, customers, and Epi employees to connect and learn from each other's experiences in the Episerver market.

Now that Ascend 2019 is over, these are a few of my takeaways:

Multiple Image Support in PropertyList

While working on a past project with heavy use of IList<T> properties I ran into several usability situations. One of those situations involved read-only values that were being imported from an external system. They needed to appear in the CollectionEditor, but did not need to be editable (read about that here). Another scenario I encountered involved images in the CollectionEditor. It started off with a simple implementation of the solution provided by Grzegorz Wiecheć, but evolved into something more.

One of the challenges we faced was the customer's need for multiple images in the list, and those images not always sharing the same property name. As with the issue around default values, some of the data for this was being synchronized with an external system, so we needed to be flexible with the property names and the number of image properties that might be present in the list.