Anonymous Personalization Without Leaving Drupal

Mike Lander, Elevated Third

Drupal has always been very strong at customizing user experiences for authenticated users, but what about anonymous users? What if you wanted to show a new banner block on your home page for first time visitors? Or gate a resource until users have filled out a contact form? For the most part, anonymous user display is determined by the url path, and per-user customization is dependent on excluding the page from cache, custom javascript or third parties. In this session, we'll introduce the Smart Content contributed suite of modules. Smart Content at its core is a toolset for defining conditions based on data attainable from anonymous and authenticated users(such as cookies, browser properties and third-party data), and providing subsequent reactions utilizing Drupal's content editing prowess. In this session, we'll cover initial setup and some basic use cases for the modules, as well as dig deeper into what's under the hood and how it all works.

Key areas we'll address:

Brief overview of personalization, the modules and project history
Module setup and step-by-step implementation walkthrough
How it works and how we minimize impact on performance
Potential use cases and sub-module ecosystem
How you can get involved!


A basic understanding of site building in Drupal will help you get the most out of this session. Technical details will be explained mostly at a conceptual level. We'd like for you to walk away as energized about the project as we are, with enough know-how to start trying the modules on your own projects. Smart Content gives you a great way to introduce yourself into the world of personalization without ever leaving Drupal.

Speakers
Mike Lander
Technical Director @ Elevated Third

https://www.midcamp.org/2019/topic-proposal/anonymous-personalization-without-leaving-drupal

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