Bringing back the Composer personalisation container in EPiServer 7

Jan 30, 2013  

When using EPiServer Composer in EPiServer CMS 6 R2 one of my favourite features was the personalisation container:

Personalisation Container

For those who haven't used it, it allowed editors to quickly add personalisation to a page by dragging a personalisation container onto a page, selecting some visitor groups then drag/dropping some content functions which will be displayed based on the visitor groups selected.

We now have EPiServer 7 with blocks where blocks can be used in place of Composer. If shared blocks are to be personalised then they must be personalised at a block level using access rights (Edit block > Forms editing > Visible to: "Manage").  This leaves a major headache: Blocks will be personalised for every page they are used on. This isn't the case when using the Personalisation Container and may not be appropriate for all blocks in EPiServer 7.

So I decided to try and try and bring Composer Personalisation container like functionality to EPiServer 7. This would allow editors to use a container block to show/hide blocks based on visitor group.