Joost's Sitecore blog

Engagement plans This blog focuses on Sitecore 8.2.x but may still apply to Automation plans in Sitecore 9, although code samples will not work, the general idea remains the same. With this implementation I aimed to enable marketers to trigger engagement plans upon goal triggering in their website. It is already possible out of the box to enroll a visitor in an engagement plan on WFFM form submission, manually or through EXM campaigns. However I wanted to enable our marketers to have more flexibility. For this I designed a mechanism that allows a marketer to hook up Sitecore goals to engagement plans. In this way a marketer can select an engagement plan and state that a user should be enrolled in upon triggering a Sitecore goal.  Item definitions  I started by making templates to enable the marketer in selecting his Sitecore goals and engagement plans to enroll the visitor in. With this setup there is now a connection between goals and plans. A marketer c...

Server roles and WFFM A while a go I ran into an issue with WFFM in a setup where we had a separate processing server in our Sitecore server topology. We experienced issues with submitted WFFM data not always appearing in xDB, reports and contact lists. After lots of investigation and debugging, it turned out the Sitecore installation document for WFFM on Sitecore 8.2 update 7 is not correct. It tells you to install the following assemblies in your processing server: \Website\bin\Sitecore.WFFM.dll  \Website\bin\Sitecore.WFFM.Analytics.dll \Website\bin\Sitecore.WFFM.Abstractions.dll The missing piece here, is that you also need to deploy the  Sitecore.Forms.Core .dll to this instance, otherwise the WFFM events in your eventqueue will never be picked up by your processing server. Also your contact lists you want your WFFM contact indexed on will not work. Hope this will help someone that runs into the exact same issue.

Sitecore and UTM  A lot of blogs have been written about Sitecore vs Google Analytics and how they can be complimentary. In many of the implementations I have seen, marketers use these tools side by side.  As marketers seem so fond of Google Analytics and have a hard time parting with it to only use Sitecore, I figured, why not make them work at the same time. Marketers seem to be more familiar with setting up campaigns using UTM than setting them up with custom parameters for Sitecore campaigns, so why not make Sitecore work with these UTM parameters as well.  So what I did is make it configurable in Sitecore to hookup UTM parameters to Sitecore campaigns. This blog shows how I did that. Setting up your templates I started by defining a template where you can tie these together. Field1: UTM Source key Single-line text to copy your UTM source key into Field2: Linked Campaign A droptree field with a query, something like this: query:/sitecore/syst...