Commonly Underutilized CMS Editor Features
Through my years of working with Optimizely (Episerver) CMS I’ve strived to take advantage of any features that increase efficiency. I’m surprised as I work with even seasoned CMS editors that some common features are often underutilized. These 5 features you’re probably not using will help make your CMS editor experience more productive. Enjoy!
1. Dragging pages from the Page Tree into properties
When your content type has Page Reference or Url properties, you can drag a page directly from the page tree into the property to set it. This will save you several clicks compared to using the page selector modal. This feature automatically accounts for property restrictions as well, preventing you from selecting pages which may not be valid for that property. As someone who keeps the page navigator pinned, this feature really allows me to populate pages super quickly.
Bonus: You can use a similar trick when populating image properties by dragging them directly from the image library!
2. Blocks in a Rich-Text Editor
Rich-text editor…TinyMCE…WYSIWYGs…whatever you call them, did you know that you could add blocks directly to them? This feature allows CMS Editors a little more flexibility in their template building for situations where you do not have access to Content Areas. One successful example we have used this option for is to allow Editors to insert a “Scroll to Top” button” in the middle of a long section of rich text.
Caution: While this is very powerful, not every block on your site may be built with intent for Rich-text insertion. Make sure to test any content with blocks inserted into a Rich-text editor thoroughly to ensure it does not break your site styles.
3. Visitor Group Statistics
Visitor Groups are a powerful Optimizely (Episerver) feature that allows CMS Editors to tailor specific experiences to segmented audiences. An important facet of any personalization plan is to track your Visitor Group usage to make informed decisions about relevancy. Optimizely (Episerver) comes out-of-box with statistic tracking for your Visitor Groups, but the location is a little unintuitive.
To see Visitor Group statistics, navigate to your Dashboard and add the Visitor Group Statistics gadget. You can find more information about the Dashboard and gadgets at this page in the Episerver User Guide.
4. Reports
A simple, but often forgotten, feature of Optimizely (Episerver) is the Reports panel.
In particular, I want to highlight the Link Status Report. This report will scan your Episerver pages for broken URLs that you may need to update. I would recommend looking at this report at least once a week and fixing broken links as they are identified.
Note: If you attempt to run this report and do not see any results, you are either super great at keeping up with your broken links or the scheduled job responsible for generating these results is not active. Have your site administrator check the scheduled job named Link Validation in Admin mode to ensure that it is set to run periodically.
5. Projects
Finally, I want to mention Projects. Projects have been around since Episerver 10, but I am always surprised when I hop into an Episerver site only to realize they have never been used!
Projects are a great way to manage multiple pieces of content that need to be published at the same time. Examples include announcing a new season of upcoming events or publishing gated-content. You can find more information about projects via these links:
