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Personalization Framework Send comments on this topic.
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Sitefinity Building Parts > Personalization Framework

Glossary Item Box

This topic provides an overview of personalization and in what form is it provided in Sitefinity.

 

Personalization Defined

Personalization is a web application feature which allows saving specific settings for specific users of one and the same application. This is done by collecting the data from the user either explicitly or implicitly. Following are examples of both types of personalization:


Explicit Collection Examples

  • A user of a weather report site selects his/her region in order to view only its report.  In consequent visits, the site only shows the specified region report.
  • A user selects a specific theme of a site, which allows multiple themes, and the same theme is applied during the consequent visits of that user.

 

Implicit Collection Examples

  • A user visits a weather report site for the first time. The site gets the region of that user from the user IP address. The site shows the region report during consequent visits of that user until s/he explicitly changes the region.

 

Personalization in Sitefinity

Sitefinity provides explicit personalization which means the user should explicitly save specific settings. These settings could be found under the link "My Preferences" in the upper right corner of the screen in the administrative part of Sitefinity. The link is situated beside the name of the user, the My Profile and Logout links:

My Preferences Link 

Figure 1 

 

Types of preferences:

  • General - provides the option to set a specific part of the Sitefinity administration as a starting screen after logging in the administrative part:
    General Settings

    Figure 2 

     

  • Dashboard settings - there are two settings of the dashboard that could be saved: Main Section Panel and Recently Modified Items (see Figure 3). Main Section Panel could either be displayed or not. The Recently Modified Items setting screen includes various items such as modules whose links will be displayed if specified so.
    Dashboard Settings

    Figure 3 

     

  • Page Editor settings - the page editor has two modes: classic and overlay. This preference provides the ability of the user to set a default mode for the page editor.
    Page Editor Settings

    Figure 4  

 

Although only explicit personalization is provided out-of-the-box, a developer could extend Sitefinity to implement implicit personalization as well. The Personalization topic provides more details of its structure and usage.  

 

See Also