The Episerver CMS is an incredibly powerful tool for both web developers and content editors, providing capabilities for personalization, integrations with third-party systems, and automating website tasks. From the interface which authors use to create a website’s content to the site’s underlying code, Episerver offers a great deal of power and flexibility.
One feature of Episerver that brings this flexibility to the forefront is Content Blocks, which allow developers to provide spaces on pages in which different types of content can be added, making for a more modular design. Here are some of the benefits that content blocks provide to both a site’s editors and to Episerver developers:
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Reusable Content
Instead of having to recreate commonly used content, site authors can use content blocks to create certain pieces of content that can be inserted in the proper place on new pages. This could include calls-to-action, links to related blogs or product pages, or images or videos. By building a library of content blocks that can be used throughout the site, content authors are able to easily reuse this content in a variety of ways, making for a simple, dynamic content editing experience.
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Simplified Code
From a developer perspective, content blocks make a site’s underlying code cleaner and easier to understand. Instead of creating a variety of different complicated page templates, developers can add space for content blocks to existing templates, specifying which types of content can be inserted where. Rather than recreating and reusing the code for different modules on a number of different pages, content blocks allow for the easy addition of functionality to these pages without a bunch of extra code. This not only makes a site’s code more simple, it allows it to run more efficiently.
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Targeted Content
One of the coolest things you can do with blocks in Episerver content areas is utilizing visitor groups for personalized content. A visitor group is a set of criteria that a visitor to a page must meet to be considered a part of the group. This could be things like ip address, time of day a page is visited or the url referrer. Episerver has several built-in visitor groups that editors can utilize out-of-the-box and developers can easily define custom visitor groups with a small amount of custom code. Targeted content like this can be a very powerful tool for landing pages or other types of content.
These are just a few of the ways that content blocks can benefit both developers and content authors. If you want to know more about content blocks or how to get the most out of your Episerver website, please contact us to speak to a Solutions Engineer, or feel free to share your own tips or ideas in the comments below!
