13 Friday Dec 2013
Posted in Interaction Design, Sitecore, Sitecore DMS
Tags
content targeting, DMS, Gamification, Interaction, marketing, marketing automation, Sitecore, User Interface
The Sitecore DMS (Digital Marketing System) is an outstanding tool for marketing automation, personalization, content targeting, and much more. However, the DMS could also be rebuilt to be used as a very powerful tool for Gamification.
30 Monday Sep 2013
Posted in Html/Css/Javascript, Sitecore, Webforms for Marketers
As already mentioned in a previous article, the otherwise very decent Webforms for Marketers module of Sitecore is in need of an update. The release of HTML5 has had an especially great impact on how we build forms on the web. This is the reason why I have made some HTML5 extensions to the WFFM module.
In this article I will show how to add a textbox with an expandable dropdown list underneath it. It is still a textbox, so the user is able to enter free text. But at the same time it has a list of suggestions that expands when the users focusses on the form or begins typing.
12 Thursday Sep 2013
In a previous article I showed how to create a multilanguage list of countries in Sitecore. Now we are going to discuss how to use this list of countries to create a country picker form field in Webforms for Marketers.
11 Wednesday Sep 2013
The Rich Text field type in Sitecore allows the user to create and store HTML-formatted content. Most of the time you want to display this content on the website as is, but sometimes you want to truncate it (for example in some kind of overview).
In that case you have to strip the HTML from the content. If you want to truncate the content at 300 characters for example, you will risk stripping the closing tag of an element while maintaining the opening tag. This will not good in any browser.
So we are going to use a very simple Regular Expression to strip the HTML from our Rich Text Field (you can use this of course for any type of database field that contains HTML): “<.*?>”. After that, we can take for example 300 characters, and add “…” after it, as this is a conventional visual signal that the text has been truncated.
Item item = Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem("/sitecore/content/home/some item");
string richTextFieldRawValue = item["Some Rich Text Field"]
Regex htmlRemovalRegex = new Regex("<.*?>", RegexOptions.Compiled);
string richTextFieldWithoutHtml = htmlRemovalRegex.Replace(richTextFieldRawValue, string.Empty);
string truncatedRichTextField = richTextFieldWithoutHtml.SubString(0, 300) + "...";
06 Friday Sep 2013
Posted in .NET Framework, Sitecore, Sitecore DMS
Tags
Conditional Rendering, content targeting, coordinate, DMS, GeoIP, geolocation, marketing, Sitecore, Weather
Content Targeting is one of the strongest points of Sitecore’s Digital Marketing Suite (DMS). Marketeers are able to set up rules and conditions for rendering conditional content on the website. The conditions provided by Sitecore out-of-the-box include: checking how many times the visitor has visited the website, checking what language version the website is in, and checking the “profile” of the visitor (in which predefined category the visitor fits). Marketeers could also check from which city the visitors is requesting the web page. This is done by looking up the GeoLocation of the visitor by his IP address.
01 Thursday Aug 2013
Posted in ASP.NET, Data Architecture, Sitecore
Sitecore comes with a list of countries, including a Country two-letter ISO code. This list is available at the node: “/sitecore/system/Settings/Analytics/Lookups/Countries/Afghanistan”. But this list is not very convenient, because it is not multi-language: it only stores the country name in English. And because it is a list of items, its performance could also be improved by making it a NameValueList. This is convenient for example when you want your forms to have a Country Selector field. In this article I will show how a multi-language list of countries could be created and supported in Sitecore.
05 Friday Jul 2013
Posted in Data Architecture, Sitecore
Tags
One of Sitecore’s greatest feats is the ability to organize multiple websites in one single Content Management System. End users could achieve a significant productivity gain by this. But it also allows content editors to share content over multiple sites. This results in much flexibility, and offers users a much broader content strategy.
Content Sharing could be achieved with a number of different structures:
18 Tuesday Jun 2013
Posted in .NET Framework, Html/Css/Javascript, Sitecore
The Sitecore module Webforms for Marketers is a great module: it offers a superb user experience, and its functionality is very extensible. However, even after the latest update (pdf) (january 2013) the module makes almost no use of the new HTML5 capabilities. In this series of articles I will demonstrate how to extend the WFFM module with custom field types with HTML5 functionalities.
This article I will discuss the HTML5 “placeholder” attribute. This attribute enables you to prefill the textbox with content, and let the content disappear when the user focusses on the textbox. (This functionality has also been called “Watermark“).
07 Friday Jun 2013
Posted in Data Architecture, Sitecore
Templates
The design principle “favor composition over inheritance” from the Gang of Four book “Design Patterns” states that a combination of functionality should be made in a flat structure, rather than in a hierarchical structure. This way, the functionality becomes more reusable, and the combination more flexible.
The principle is originally meant for software architecture but it also applies to data architecture. In this article we will show how the principle could be applied to the main data architecture of Sitecore: templates.
Templates in Sitecore have the following features:
28 Thursday Feb 2013
Posted in .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Sitecore, Software Architecture
Tags
loosely coupled design, modular integration, Sitecore, Sitecore Ecommerce Services, Sitecore Search Solution, software architecture
The module Sitecore Ecommerce Services offers a quite brilliant Search Framework. With this framework it is possible to build up a Query with a strongly typed model. This Query model could then be passed to an implementation of “ISearchProvider”, which uses a Lucene search or a Sitecore query search for example, and it returns a collection of items. This is quite brilliant, because it offers an abstraction layer for the several different ways to search the Sitecore database. This greatly enhances loosely coupled application design, because it enabled several (filter) controls to add filters to the Query model, without having to know which implementation is used to search the database.
The module harbors three implementation of searchproviders: Sitecore Query, Fast Query and Lucene. In this article I will show how this framework could be extended with a SOLR (Sitecore Search Solution) implementation. SOLR is a much more powerful searchprovider, because it enables facetted search. By adding an abstraction layer to the Sitecore Search Solution implementation, one also upholds the principles of modular, loosely coupled application design.
