7 Things I bet You Didn't Know about Experience Manager

In the past few weeks, I've had a chance to shine the flashlight a little closer on the SDL Tridion Experience Manager interface of the Content Management System, especially so for the new SDL Tridion 2013 SP1 version out since the first week of December.

Here is a list of things I uncovered and found worth noting:

1. The SDL Tridion Live Documentation for 2013 SP1 has a video on the entire Experience Manager install, configuration plus installation steps.  There are architecture illustrations as well, easy to follow if you look for the 1-2-3 steps marked on the diagrams. 

http://sdllivecontent.sdl.com/LiveContent/content/en-US/SDL%20Tridion%20full%20documentation-v1/GUID-3C70F892-69F4-4FEE-922D-39F1AFEBD539

2. The Content Manager Explorer Dashboard has been morphed into a slide-out navigation, therefore any extensions created for Experience Manager and previously visible on the Dashboard need to be re-coded for the slide-out navigation panel.  

3. You must remember to re-install Default Template Building Blocks from TemplateBuilder to ensure the newly updated TBBs are introduced in the Content Manager.

4. The Dreamweaver call RenderComponentField() is deprecated and replaced with the following new Dreamweaver calls.  The main reason for this is to allow multivalued embedded fields to be editable from Experience Manager, something many have been looking forward to.

@@FieldStartMarker(FIELDNAME)@@ and @@FieldEndMarker@@

@@FieldValueStartMarker()@@

      @@GetFieldValue(FIELDNAME, 0)@@

@@FieldValueEndMarker()@@

They also must be used in proper order or else will not output the equivalent tags which are recognizable by Experience Manager.

@@FieldStartMarker("fieldname")@@

     @@FieldValueStartMarker()@@

          @@GetFieldValue("fieldname")@@

     @@FieldValueEndMarker()@@

@@FieldEndMarker()@@

5. The SessionPreview token session length is configurable in cd_storage_conf.xml.  Update the <Timeout> element, measured in milliseconds, for example 60000 for 1 minute, 120000 for 2 minutes and so on.  

<Wrappers>
  <Wrapper Name="SessionWrapper">e
    <Timeout>60000</Timeout>
    <Storage Type="persistence" Id="db-session" dialect="MSSQL" Class="com.tridion.storage.persistence.JPADAOFactory">
      <Pool Type="jdbc" Size="5" MonitorInterval="60" IdleTimeout="120" CheckoutTimeout="120" />

The session length accounts for the little trip Experience Manager takes while a user clicks UpdatePreview to save new changes in the browser and the session database.

6. Enabling multiple targets for Session Preview (eg. Live and Staging) may cause ExperienceManager not to work. Experience Manager should only run on Staging type sites, not on Live.

7. There is a number of fixes provided exclusively for Experience Manager in 2013 SP1, and they vary from editorial to technical.  For instance, when clicking on "Finish Editing" the latest changes done on the page are shown during reloading of the page.

So if you plan on tackling the installation, configuration and implementation for Experience Manager keep the above pointers in mind when you do and you will definitely have a brighter go of it!