Jeffery Rondeau gave a great presentation on the Sitecore rules engine and showed some things you can do with it other than personalization. My favorite was limiting the number of instances of a given component on a single page (think hero images). Here are my key takeaways:
- What can you do with the Sitecore Rules Engine?
- Personalize content
- Most used and widely known use case
- Control of how pages get built
- Limit the number of renderings on a page
- Limit the number of renderings per placeholder
- Limit the number of a given module that can appear on a page
- Data source location flexibility
- Reusable conditions and actions
- Improve placeholder settings
- Manipulate data source locations
- Auto-create content folders
- Personalize content
- Structure of rules
- Located in master://system/settings/rules
- Rule Elements Folders
- A group of conditions and actions
- Something that can evaluate to true or false
- The things you want to do based on the condition
- Tags
- Gets custom conditions to show in the experience editor
- Rule Context folders
- Indicated by blue icons
- Add you custom tag to the rule context item where you want you item to show
- Example
- Given a hero image component
- Create a rule that says “when the number of hero images on the page is >= 1” then “remove the hero image rendering from the list of available renderings”
- How do implement custom rules?
- Extend the Sitecore placeholder rendering pipeline
I really enjoyed this session. You can find Jeffery Rondeau on twitter. Also, feel free to follow me on twitter and keep up with more of my session reviews.
