Architecting Sites For Personalization

Personalization tools such as Acquia Lift have given us an unprecedented degree of control in customizing user experience. We can now server a different page to users based on their device, location and even browsing habits. How can we as developers build our sites in a way that makes it easy for all these moving parts to work together?

Years ago we had to learn how to integrate mobile users into our development. There may have been some grumblings but time has shown that ignoring mobile users not only disappoints your users, it disappoints Google as well. Personalization is the next given that we're going to have to learn to include in our sites. But how can we make this seamless and more importantly how can we make it easy so our content editors can handle personalizing almost anything?

This presentation will go over how personalization works with a focus on Acquia Lift. We'll also show some examples of how to keep personalization in mind from initial planning stages to final launch and beyond:

• Why and how to plan a personalization strategy early
• Developing your site so that as many elements can be swappable as possible
• How clean markup and best practices with Javascript will allow you to integrate with any personalization system
• Making sure that elements more likely to be personalized are in an easy to update format, not buried in a view in a block in a pane in a panel.

This presentation assumes an intermediate understanding of Drupal site building, no previous personalization experience is required.