Client-Side Event Tracking with Sitecore Analytics

After the previous blog post about combining JavaScript and CSS, I decided to create more modules standardizing features that can be used out of the box at many websites.

Today I'll describe new module that allows tracking client-side events with Sitecore Analytics. Such feature is really important for today's highly interactive sites, and you'll see how easy it is to implement it for Sitecore.

After installing the module, you'll be able to track external file downloads, Ajax events and any kind of visitor interaction that does not cause the page to refresh (expanding / collapsing page areas, popup windows, etc.).

Live visitor tracking with Sitecore OMS and Bing Maps

Real-time information delivery is the one of the most important elements of our online experience. When information being available at the moment it's produced, you can act really quickly and efficiently. That is why the words "live", "instant", "real-time" are so popular in modern web applications.
There are lot of fun apps that show people's tweets, photo galleries on the map, but how about getting similar(and useful) app for your own website?
If it's build on Sitecore, it's incredibly easy. You just need to create a UI and a service that will retrieve your data.

In this post I'll show how to create application that will show Web Forms submissions on your website using Bing Maps.

Count users online with Sitecore OMS

When you have a web application, you might want to know how many users are currently online. If you have visited some of web online forums you can see (usually on the first page) the number of currently online users.
This information might be also used to postpone some website jobs if there are too many users online, etc.
How do we know / count how many sessions or users are currently connected to our website in Sitecore?

"Set Relative DataSource" action makes total personalization effortless.

Some people say that true personalization is too complex and expensive to set up and maintain, but with Sitecore it's incredibly easy to setup personalization rules, configure rule-based content, etc. In general, to make some personalized content, you should perform the following actions:

1. Create a personalization rule (add conditions and actions, let's say "Set DataSource" action to point personalized content folder). 
2. Apply it to the rendering or sublayout.

While second step cannot be avoided (unless you use global rules), the first one sometimes looks redundant, as the conditions  of the most rules are very similar, especially in location-based ones. The only difference is a DataSource. The main goal of creating "SetRelativeDataSource" action is breaking such dependency and making "clicks only" personalization setup possible.

The idea is following: let the rule control only "personalized" part of the DataSource, taking the "base"  DataSource part from the control.

Let's say, you have a lot of sub-trees with personalized content for different controls: