Announcing Blend.Optimizely

The world of development is built upon the shoulders of those who came before us. We re-use code, make adjustments based on other people’s findings, and progressively learn and adjust our core body of knowledge. At Blend, this is one of our core values, and we’ve recently made this value real by releasing a collection of tools that we use to spin up each of our Optimizely projects.

Named Blend.Optimizely, the collection includes several utilities and convenience methods for various components within Optimizely.

Blend.Optimizely was developed by several members of our development team over years of Optimizely implementations, and provides a collection of helpful utilities for Optimizely CMS 12 sites — essentially, it allows us to re-use our tools from project to project, without needing to reinvent the wheel every time.

Blend.Optimizely includes the following:

• Has Value Extensions — A collection of extension methods to provide a consistent interface to check if various types of objects are null or empty. Checks vary depending on what the object is.
• Pagination Model — A simple model for calculating pagination.
• Get Friendly URL — Returns a valid friendly url with options to include non-content routing and the full domain and scheme for canonical URLs.
• Content Event Handler — Provides a convenient way to tie into various Optimizely CMS events, such as publishing and saving events.  This is a nice clean way to add Content events directly to the content class.
• Enumerable Extensions — Shorthand methods for manipulating enumerables, (splitting into chunks, splitting into groups, or converting content areas and reference lists into content).

You can find the collection on Github or in the Optimizely Nuget feed under Blend.Optimizely.