EPiServer 7 CMO

EPiServer 7 is out! CMO is also available in the main installation package, go and download it.

What’s new in EPiServer 7 CMO

CMO is included in EPiServer 7 CMS license

If you have EPiServer 7 CMS license you get EPiServer 7 CMO for free. No additional license is required. Enjoy!

Ready for MVC and Web Forms

EPiServer 7 supports both Web Forms and MVC. You can even mix these technologies in your solution. CMO works on both Web Forms and MVC based sites.

Please make sure that statistics tracking scripts are included in your pages.

Deployment improvements

Now it’s possible to select existing database when installing CMO. For instance, you may decide to use your existing CMS database and don’t create separate one for CMO.

Live Monitor integration is available as separate installation option.

Live Monitor integration option

Enable it if you want to see real-time user activity in campaign reports. It will install Live Monitor on target site automatically. This option is not available if you don’t have Live Monitor installed on the server. You can run Live Monitor .msi installer later and reinstall CMO+Live Monitor integration on site afterwards.

Bug fixes

EPiServer 7 CMO includes the number of bug fixes and improved performance.

Notes and tips

Statistics tracking

EPiServer Framework includes new tiny framework developed to manage client resources and inject stuff on pages. We use it to track statistics for CMO and Live Monitor.

Please consider best practice guidelines, requirements for page templates and upgrading documentation to make sure that statistics tracking scripts are available on your site.

Creating page versions for A/B testing

EPiServer 7 CMS comes with new brand editing UI and one of the ideas is that you are always editing and working on last draft.

You may want to create several page versions to run A/B test. It’s pretty easy, just start editing your original page. New draft is created automatically and you can use it as page version in A/B test:

Page editing

You can create more versions as follows:

Add Versions gadget on panel in Edit mode:

Adding new gadget on a panel

Select published version (your original page) in the list:

Selecting published page version

Click on “New Draft from here” option in Options button in main toolbar:

Creating new draft

New draft is created and you can edit page version for your test. Penguins are nice, right?

Editing page version

Mark your page versions as “Ready to Publish”.

A/B tests and shared blocks

Let’s say you have a page and shared block is placed in one of the content area on the page. Probably you would like to run A/B test for this page and see which block version gives you the best result.

A/B testing for shared blocks is not fully supported by the current CMO version and the page is rendered with published block version.

You can create several shared blocks and place them on corresponding page versions. In this case you are testing page versions that hold different blocks.

Using CMO with Alloy templates

New Alloy templates project contains smart XML transformations that are applied to the web.config when the project is being rebuilt. Unfortunatelly it overrides existing configuration file and as a starting point it uses web.config file that was on site before Alloy templates installation. So if you create a site with Alloy templates, then install some modules that update configuration file (for example CMO or Live Monitor) and then rebuild the Alloy project,  web.config file will be overriden and all module settings will be lost. 

To avoid this issue you can install CMO and other modules first and then install Alloy templates. Another workaround could be synchronizing web.config files in site root and [Configuration]\EPiServer folder or disabling post-build events of the Alloy project.

Please see more details in this blog post and in this document.

More information

You can find more information about EPiServer 7 CMO in the following documents:

Installation Instructions – EPiServer 7 CMO

Upgrading guide

CMO section in EPiServer 7 SDK

User guide

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