Using Adobe Test and Target, I know I can setup mboxes and push various pieces of content into them for testing purposes. But how do I test two seperate versions of a homepage against one another? Is this something that can be test in test and target?
Do I just make one big mbox that holds the whole homepage?
You can create an mBox that 'redirects' to the versions of your homepage. You can do this by setting up separate experiences, and splitting your campaign based on a traffic split, or via some other metric.
For example, you can simply have one mbox that has two offers pointed to it. The first "offer" could simply do a default content - which would be your control.
The second "offer/experience" could simply be a java-script redirect to your alternative homepage.
You can then add multiple experiences/offers all posted to the same box that do similar tings to have a ABCD type of test.
I would avoid putting too much code in an mbox, as its loaded dynamically and can have performance impacts. I think a simple redirect to a static HTML page is a better way to go.
Related
I want to build a website, maybe similar to a movie database, where every page has, say, actors, director, year (it seems that Lektor can deal very well with such structured metadata), and I am thinking about how to realize internal links between pages on that site.
Say I have a text such as
just like in [his previous movie](link), he shows again ...
then I guess I could use the absolute path of the linked page as link target, but that makes me very inflexible with respect to changing URL structure. Can I somehow just use the ID of the target content?
Or, better yet, can I somehow automatically obtain the title of the linked page?
just like in his previous movie <<link:title>>, he shows again ...
Can I use the standard Markdown blocks for that or would I have to add some handcrafted database lookup logic?
if some contents will be changed in future. I think you can use the databag feature to implement it. you just modify the databg in case changed is need.
I want to run an A/B-test or an experiment for whole part of the site. For example on my /blog/ page, where one variation would have a newsletter form and other variation a free ebook download button.
The problem is that I have to use a full URL path for the experiments, for example /blog/2013/article/1?var=1 and /blog/2013/article/1?var=2 With this method I would need create a new experiment for each blog post. This is impossible.
Any tips on how to approach this?
It's possible, but the documentation is lacking.
When you choose your variation URLs, you need to use relative instead of http://. This let's you use query parameters to define the variations, instead of the full URL. In your example, you would define your original page as:
http: //www.example.com/blog/2013/article/1
and your variation URLs would be ?var=1, var=2, etc. using relative as the option in the dropdown (instead of http:// or https://).
Here's the not-so-clear documentation on using relative URLs for your variations:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2664470?hl=en&ref_topic=1745208
One important thing to remember is that if you're doing it this way, you need to include the content experiment code on every "original" page.
There's also another way to have even more control over serving the variation pages and controlling the experiment using the Content Experiments JavScript API. This is a relatively new feature - you can see the developer documentation about this here:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/experiments
I am not sure this is possible. You might look at a more robust yet simple to use tool like Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely.
I have a set of GWT UIs, some created directly in Java and others created using UI Binder ui.xml files.
I localized them following the official GWT guidelines (e.g. creating interface extending Messages interface).
I now wonder if there is an easy way to write a unit test to validate that message keys get replaced by the corresponding values from property files?
I guess I could do that using GWTTestCase, but actually I don't need a browser to render the page. Instead, it would be enough to get the raw string output and check with some regex that the messages are present.
Is that possible? Or is it better to test such things in running application like using Selenium?
Just a note. Besides the important things you are trying to validate, one of the critical points in my project during messages localization tests is to see: if the translated text fits the allocated space. If it's a box of fixed size, overlapping texts don't look nice. And this cannot be checked with unit tests. That's why the manual review is in to-do list when new locale is added or certain labels/messages are changed.
I'd recommend Selenium. Checking that the messages are present could be tricky, because in that case you should know the place where the label is located, in which tags. In my opinion, using GWTTestCase makes sense when it comes to testing controllers' behavior. Simple search by value guarantees only presence but not correct placement.
I think, it also makes sense to use those translation properties in the tests, so the strings are not duplicates in the tests.
I have a website that has related pages. They have links that point back and forth to one another but I have no integrated system, nor do I know what that would mean.
What is the minimum code that a group of web pages must have to be considered a Content Management System (CMS). Is it that all the settings are in the database and the pages are generated somehow? Is there some small snippet that all my pages could share that makes them a CMS, database or not?
Thanks. I was also hoping not to have to study a giant CMS to see what makes it a CMS . After maybe a basic understanding I would know what I was looking for.
edit: here's why I ask about code. Whenever I have looked at a CMS, and maybe they aren't all the same, I saw that to develop a module you always had to inherit from certain classes and had some necessary code. I didn't know if there was some magic model that I just don't get that all cms makers understand.
edit: perhaps my question is more about being extendable or pluggable. What would a minimum look like? Is it possible to show that here?
edit: how about this? Is something a CMS if it is not extendable and/or pluggable?
I think this is really impossible to say. We all manage content. The "system" is just whatever mechanism you use to do so(dragging and dropping in Explorer or committing content changes via a SQL query). To say there is a minimum amount of code needed really isn't indicative. What is indicative is how often you find yourself making mistakes and how easy it is for a given user of a given skill level and knowledge to execute the functions in the designed system. That tells you the quality/degree of what you have in place being worthy of being called a "CMS."
Simply put a CMS is an application that allows the user to publish and edit existing web content.
In response to the edit:
A "good" CMS allows of extensibility. By using inheritence you can extend the functionality of a CMS outside of the core components provided. That's the magic.
About Extensibility:
Depending on the language/framework you want to build your CMS with, you can load pages or controls(ASP.NET) using command built into the framework. Typically what is being done is a parent class/interface is being defined that forces an module that is to be developed to follow some given standards:
Public MustInherit Class CMSModule
'Here you will define properties and functions that need to be global to all modules being developed to extend your CMS.
public property ModuleName as string
End Class
public class PlugInFooCMSPage
inherits CMSModule
end class
Then it's just a matter of simply loading a module dynamically in whatever construct a given language/framework provides.
Ultimately, a CMS is a system that lets you manage content, so it needs an user interface that is dedicated to letting you easily create, edit and delete pages on your website.
However, it's fairly usual to expect from a CMS to provide a browser-based WYSIWYG page editor, file uploading, image resizing, url rewriting, page categories and tags, user accounts (editor, moderator, administrator), and some kind of templae system.
Without dragging you into a theoretical explanation of what a CMS is and what it's not, perhaps some tutorials on the building methodology of a CMS will help you better understand.
http://css-tricks.com/php-for-beginners-building-your-first-simple-cms/
http://www.intranetjournal.com/php-cms/
A Content Management System is a System that Manages Content. :)
So if you got many pages that share the same layout, you can create a system that stores the content into a database and when a page is requested, it gets that content, merges it with a template that contains the page header, menu, etc.. and outputs the result.
The basis idea is that you don't want to copy HTML pages, and have to edit hundreds of them when you want to change your layout.
Such a system can be very complex, featuring wysiwyg editors, toolbars, version control, multiple user publishing and much more, but it could be as simple as a single page behind a standard loging, that contains only an input field for the title and a textarea in which you type the html content.
I'm just starting to evaluate joomla CMS as a tool to build out my personal site. I'd like to manage multiple sites/domains with one copy of joomla on one host. so I'll own mysite.com and myothersite.com, which will both point to the same host/joomla code. If I do this I need to be able to set which domain/site the content I add shows up on. For some sites the content will be on both for others it will be on only one. What would be ideal it to have some kind of filtering mechanism so I don't have to manually set where the content goes.
What would be ideal is for me to set tags on the content and each site can specify which taged content to show.
My last requirement is that I be able to have different pages on each site.
Is this possible or am I asking too much from a "free" CMS?
Thanks all
I don't know if there's a component that achieves what you're describing here. I use a multi-language component in some of my sites that shows translations, but it doesn't "suppress" articles that doesn't have references to a translation: it just says "No translations to this article". I know you're not asking for translations methods, but I think the Joomfish way of selecting content based in a chosen language would be what you wanted, but not based in languages, just domains.
The only component I know it would be able to suppress articles based in pre defined parameters (in its case the language), is the Joomfish's "Table Localization Plugin", but you need to be a Joomfish silver member paying $60 to Joomfish's developers.
You could write a component(see here for plugin documentation), that analyzing the domain, would suppress articles that shouldn't appear in that specific domain. But I think it's going yo be a lot of work. You would learn a lot of Joomla's architecture, though.
How Joomla displays its content (output) is controlled entirely by parameters. So if you can control what parameters are loading, you can create multiple displays per host
However, that may be overkill in this case. You can just easily hack your template. Just make it load a different menu for siteA and siteB. (The host is set in $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])
The menu on siteA could have a tagging component item, set to display articles tagged siteA.com. The siteB will have the same for its domain.
While there are extensions that will do what you describe (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/multiple-sites), Joomla is really designed for one site at a time. I've done setups where I use the same codebase for Joomla and manage it with version control, but I always end up launching multiple sites with individual databases.
However, I don't know of any CMS that inherently allows you to share articles across instances while keeping the data centralized. You may be looking at an extension (or your own customization) regardless of which platform you pick.
We had a similar problem with needing to share content across multiple Joomla! sites so we developed this extension: http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/simple-sharing
It is not very robust in terms of what it can share but it does let you share Articles across multiple sites and choose which sites and categories those articles get published into. I hope it works for you.
Thanks!