Visitor group usage viewer for EPiServer 8

EPiServer visitor groups are a great feature and allow editors to personalise content for end users. EPiServer also has the capability for editors to preview content for certain visitor groups when viewing a page. This is a powerful capability as editors can see how the content will look when its been personalised for end users. However when a lot of visitor groups are enabled on a site its sometimes difficult for editors to work out which ones are used on a piece of content and to pick the right visitor groups to preview with.

So I decided to create a visitor group usage gadget that will help editors see what visitor groups are used on piece of content in EPiServer.

What does the visitor group usage viewer do?

The visitor group usage viewer adds a new component that shows the visitor groups that are used on the current selected version of content. It also separately shows any content that's referenced on the current content item (such as blocks or pages in a content area) as this could also affect the rendering of the current piece of content:

Also if an editor is previewing with a visitor group then a marker is shown next to that visitor group:

When switching between content the gadget updates and shows what visitor groups are in use. This can help editors see what visitor groups are used on a page, block, product etc and decide what visitor group they should preview with

Seeing it in action

Example 1: In the example below an editor personalises a block and it can be see that the gadget updates to show that the visitor group "Logged in users" has been used on the page:

Example 2: Also in this example an editor drags the Alloy Track page onto the homepage. The Alloy Track page has visitor groups set for "Alloy Track for free" and "Has purchased Alloy track" so these are shown in the "On content that's referenced section" as they may affect how the page is rendered in the content area:

How do I get it?

Its available on the EPiServer Nuget feed and is compatible with EPiServer 8 upwards.

I want to take a look at the code or contribute code where is it?

The code is over on GitHub.

A quick thanks

I wanted to say thanks to Ted Nyberg for putting his awesome guide on how to Create an EPiServer widget for edit mode as this was the starting point when building this component. Also thanks to Ben McKernan for his Dojo expertise!

Feedback

If you have any feedback, issues or ideas please let me know in the comments below or on @davidknipe.

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