Targeted content widget not working

The Ektron Targeted Content widget forms part of the Marketing Optimisation Suite. The widget allows content authors to specify conditions around which different items of content will be presented on the site. You can hook into lots of things such as user properties, the referring URL, cookie values, etc. Based upon these values you can specify conditions like “if user is in the Prospects Group then show them content item A” (or something similar).

If you ever run into a problem with the Ektron Targeted Content Widget whereby it does not allow you to add a condition when in edit mode, it may be that the App_Data folder is missing from the root of the website. The App_Data folde contains a number of data files, some of which allow the geo-location lookup facility to work. The Targeted Content widget makes use of this data and so the folder and its files need to be present.

The files in question are :

• GeoIPDomain.dat
• GeoIPOrg.dat
• GeoLiteCity.dat

These files are present as part of a normal Ektron install (a cms400min site).  I saw this happen recently where a site had not been deployed properly so thought it would be good to share.

Creating new Pagebuilder widgets in Ektron

Ektron’s PageBuilder functionality allows semi-technical users to build web pages in a graphical way using widgets that can be dragged and dropped onto the page. A widget is a small component that performs a specific function such as showing a video or displaying a block of text.

Most Ektron projects tend to make use of PageBuilder and Widgets as they provide a lot of power and flexibility for content authors. If you are new to creating widgets a good starting point is to use one of Ektron’s widgets that are provided with the CMS.

For a “blank canvas”, use the HelloWorld widget. It is very basic but contains the essential widget code that you need for every widget. Simply copy and paste the widget within Visual Studio, then rename the file and the class name and off you go.

Another common widget to copy is the ContentBlock widget. Quite often I need to show a “special” type of ContentBlock that needs to look or behave in a specific way. For example, maybe you are showing a video with a custom video player. The ContentBlock widget could be customised to default to the video folder or to only show video content in the browser. These are relatively small changes to make that can make the content editing process much easier for end users.

A third example would be to take the default Collection widget and re-purpose it to work as an ImageGallery (for instances where you might need to use a specific ImageGallery as requested by the client).