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Showing posts from August, 2020

Content Tagging with Open Calais on Sitecore

As content authors build more and more content managing and surfacing that content becomes a bigger challenge. A common request is how can content authors tag their content with relative information to help organize and surface it. With Sitecore, this can be done via Sitecore Cortex Content Tagging .  As with almost everything in Sitecore it is an extensible framework. It uses the Open Calais AI to process content and return standard tagging information. To enable this there is really not much that is needed. The Sitecore documentation has most of the steps you need  and there are a few other blog posts out there with details as well. I found what all these are lacking though is a working sample of the configuration you need. All you need is a patch file like this (just add your API token): What can be a little tricky is where to find your API Key. Just go to  https://permid.org/  login and then in navigation click on APIs and the big button that says "Display My API Token"

Reusable Business rules

One of the best aspects of Sitecore is its rules engine. It is easy to use and very extensible. I have worked on large projects which run multiple websites one thing that comes up is how can rules, which authors create, be reused? It is great we can add a personalization rule to a rendering but what if we have the same rule we want to apply multiple places? Can we do this in a way we don't have to go change that rule in each place? One approach to this is using the predefined rules that come with Sitecore. These are located at /sitecore/system/Marketing Control Panel/Personalization/Predefined Rules. Once you have created a predefined rule you can use it via personalization by click on the "predefined rules" sections when creating a new rule. Once you have done this you have a reusable rule you can edit in one place but use in lots of different personalization locations. This is great and can be very helpful. However, it only gives you access to the condition, no