Slides from talk given at Codegarden 2016 Umbraco festival by Theo Paraskevopoulos and Andy Butland on personalisation with Umbraco.

1. Umbraco Personalisation Packages
Andy Butland
Zone
@andybutland
Theo Paraskevopoulos
GrowCreate
@theotron

2. Umbraco Personalisation Packages
Personalisation Groups Pipeline CRM

3. Andy Butland
• Blog (sporadically) at http://web-matters.blogspot.it/
• Find here a copy of slides and links to various resources
• Contact: @andybutland
• I work for Zone – www.zonedigital.com - a digital agency where I’m head
of .NET development
• We’ve been Umbraco gold partners for a number of years
• We’re based in London, Bristol and Cologne
• With a few outliers like myself, living in Italy

4. Theo Paraskevopoulos
• Tech Director for GrowCreate
• Digital agency near Oxford
• Umbraco Gold Partner for last 4 years
• Documento, Pipeline CRM packages
github.com/theotron
@theotron
www.growcreate.co.uk
www.pipelinecrm.co.uk

5. Personalisation?

6. Examples

7. Examples

8. Influences, website features and CMS selection
• Requests for “personalisation” come from website RFPs and stakeholder
requirements gathering sessions
• Might fall into a class of feature “we think we need”/”would be nice to have”
• Might be something quite specific that will always require custom development
• Often though comes down to a genuine need for a general purpose, editorially
controlled means of selectively promoting content

9. The HubSpot appoach
• Marketing first, then Website
• In-bound: SEO, Social, Blogging
• Conversions: CTAs, Landing pages, Forms, Analytics
• Post-conversion: Personalisation, Automation, Email
• Approach resonates with clients
• CRM underpins everything (free!)
• Personalisation is first major use case

10. Personalisation
Groups

11. Controlled by editors not developers
CONTENT PERSONALISATION FEATURES
EDITOR DEVELOPER

12. Is personalisation a core CMS feature?
• Umbraco has a focus on delivering an excellent CMS with no barriers for
extensibility
• Community packages provide non-core features such as e-commerce, CRM,
newsletter management, split testing, themes… and currently, personalisation
• This focus shouldn’t change…
• … but does mean the product can suffer in “out of the box” comparisons
• Might be that personalisation features do need to be considered as something for
core

13. Options for personalisation with Umbraco now
• A number of community packages have been developed to offer these
types of features
• Footprint
• Spindoctor
• Personalisation Groups
• Pipeline CRM

14. Introducing Personalisation Groups
• Free and open-source package for Umbraco providing:
• Various options for common personalisation criteria:
• Day of week, time of day, Umbraco membership, session, cookie, pages viewed, geo-
location
• Extensible for development of custom criteria
• Property editors for:
• Creation of groups matching one or more criteria
• Assigning groups to content
• An API for use in templates or controllers for determining if the current user
should view a piece of content
• Find it at:
• https://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/personalisation-groups
• https://github.com/AndyButland/UmbracoPersonalisationGroups

15. Group creation
A group can be created that matches
any or all of a set of criteria.
Criteria can be chosen from the set of
built-in ones, plus any custom ones.
This group would match all “weekday
morning visitors”

16. Group creation (2)
When adding or editing a criteria in a
group, the definition is provided via a
custom dialog.

17. Associated groups with content
Via a picker, one or more groups can be
associated with a content item.

18. Customising content display
@foreach (var post in Model.Content.Children
.Where(x => x.ShowToVisitor()))
{
<h2>@post.Name</h2>
}
An extension method on
IPublishedContent named
ShowToVisitor() allows for content to
be shown or hidden to the current
visitor.
ShowToVisitor(bool) will:
• Look for groups associated with the content:
• If none found, indicate show or hide based on the passed boolean parameter
• If any found, return true if the current visitor matches any one of them according
to the criteria definitions

19. Creating custom criteria
• The Personalisation Groups package may not provide every criteria you need
• Custom criteria can be created in other packages or in the website solution
• Create class, implementing IPersonalisationGroupCriteria’s single method
MatchesVisitor()
• Provide angularjs assets:
• View for the definition editor
• Controller for the definition editor
• Service component to translate the stored definition into something human readable for
display
• On start-up, all loaded dlls are scanned for classes implementing
IPersonalisationGroupCriteria, the criteria are loaded and made available for
selection
• Shortly Theo will demonstrate how this can be done in creating a criteria
integrated with Pipeline CRM

20. Demo
• Personalising the content items in a list:
• What’s included and what’s not
• What’s promoted to the top
• Custom presentation of each element
• Personalising a single content page using sub-nodes
• Matching based on day of week and time of day
• Matching based on cookie values
• Personalising a single content page using Nested Content
• Nested Content is a list editing property editor defined by document types
• Content is still represented using IPublishedContent hence our extension method is
available
• Find it at: https://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/nested-content/

21. Pipeline CRM

22. What is Pipeline CRM?
• Custom Relationship Management
• Embedded in Umbraco back-office
• Opportunities and Tasks
• Contacts and Organisations
• Integration and Extension API

23. Reaction
“Hi X, special offers
for Y users”
CRM offers a new dimension in personalisation
Basis
Users who has
visited page X
Reaction
“”You may like Y”
Basis
User X works for
Company Y
No CRM CRM-enabled

24. Use case
Brief
Personalise the homepage for
known customers:
• Named CTA
• Message for B2B
• Personal message
How it works
1. User submits form > Pipeline Contact
2. Track with cookie
3. Retrieve Contact, display Name

25. Use case
Brief
Personalise the homepage for
known customers:
• Named CTA
• Message for B2B
• Personal message
How it works
1. Automate Contact > B2B group
2. Use Pipeline Bridge to match criteria
3. Display alt content on page

26. Use case
Brief
Personalise the homepage for
known customers:
• Named CTA
• Message for B2B
• Personal message
How it works
1. Custom Pipeline property “message”
2. Retrieve Contact from cookie
3. Display message on page

27. Toolkit
Pipeline CRM
• http://pipelinecrm.co.uk
• https://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/pipeline-crm/
• https://github.com/theotron/Using-Pipeline-CRM
Pipeline Bridge + Demo site
• https://github.com/theotron/Pipeline-Bridge

28. Wrapping up…

29. Wrapping up…
• Personalisation is a HOT topic and BIG subject
• We focused on 2 ways to do it with Umbraco
• Personalisation Groups – power to the Editor
• Pipeline CRM – an individual dimension
• Go and make wonderful things!

30. Thanks, y’all.
Andy Butland
@andybutland
Theo Paraskevopoulos
@theotron