Testing Personalization rules with Explore Mode presets

Question

I am very new to Sitecore (8.2) and was given an assignment to have a possibility to view pages with different users (member, registered, etc) in the Explore Mode.

The goal is when I select a certain preset (user), it would show the site just like it would do in normal circumstances. So if I have a preset which mimics a logged-in member, I would like to see the site as if a real member was logged in.

Everything is based on Personalization rules to determine the type of user etc...

I know how to create a preset, but now I would like to know how to mimic a user that passes these certain Personalization rules. Here is where I created the presets:

I have literally no idea what I'm doing or even what I'm talking about and I can't find anything on Google.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Your request - 'I would like to know how to mimic a user that passes these certain Personalization rules'

It sounds like you know how to create an Experience Explorer preset, but aren't sure how to configure the Experience Explorer preset. Since your use case is about non-logged in user vs. logged in user, we'll start there.

I'm going to make an assumption that your project uses the Sitecore User Manager for login authentication and that you've set Sitecore roles to associate users (members) to member type (member, registered, etc). That's the best practice, if you want to use out of the box Sitecore personalization.

Within the Experience Explorer preset, go to the Visitor Information section. You can go to the Associate Sitecore User field and find a member profile that has the permissions that you'd like to mimic. That will pass the user's roles to Sitecore. If you use the current user is a member of the specific role personalization rule, you can personalize components to the various roles.

If you need to know how to personalize a component...

Go to the component and click on this icon

Click the '+' sign (1) Name the new version of the component (2) Select the personalized content (3) Select 'edit rule' (4)

Search for the 'current user is a member of the specific role' rule

Select the role for the member type your personalizing

Note: You can build out pretty detailed Experience Explorer presets. Take a look at the Onsite Behavior, Visitor Information, Location, Referral Information and History sections to get a feel for preset variables that you can add.