Blog posts by Santiago Morla

Technical SEO That Ships: Building Google News Sitemaps Into the CMS

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:18:45 GMT

Technical SEO is full of work that sounds small in a planning meeting and turns out to be product infrastructure once you start building it. “Add a news sitemap” is one of those requests. If the goal is to be discoverable in Google News, the work is not just about generating XML. You need publication-specificContinue reading

Gated Media Without Fragile Redirects in Optimizely CMS

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:22:41 GMT

Restricted media usually looks simple on the whiteboard. If the user can read the asset, serve it. If they cannot, redirect them to sign in. In practice, document protection breaks in much more interesting ways than that. The rendered page may expose a direct asset URL before the request pipeline ever sees it. A redirectContinue reading

Moving SSO Configuration From `appsettings` Files to PaaSPortal Without Rewriting the App

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 15:56:29 GMT

That was the interesting part of this configuration update. The visible code change was tiny: the committed value for SSO:AzureAD_ClientSecret was removed from appsettings.json and appsettings.Production.json, leaving the key present but empty. The actual secret was then expected to come from PaaSPortal-managed application settings at deployment time. On paper, that sounds almost too small toContinue reading

Why `/episerver/health` Failed Behind CMS Security Layers and How We Fixed It

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 23:02:55 GMT

Health check failures are often diagnosed as an infrastructure problem first. The app must be down. The load balancer must be wrong. The probe configuration must be off. But sometimes the endpoint is perfectly fine and the real issue is much closer to the request pipeline. That was the shape of this fix. The failingContinue reading

How We Stopped Deleted CMS Pages from Showing Up in Personalized Recommendations

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:00:00 GMT

A small recommendation bug can quietly damage trust when deleted or unpublished pages keep showing up in personalized content modules. Here is a practical pattern for validating third-party recommendation URLs against live CMS content before rendering them.

Extending UrlResolver to Generate Lowercase Links in Optimizely CMS 12

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 15:23:52 GMT

When working with Optimizely CMS 12, URL consistency is crucial for SEO and usability. By default, Optimizely does not enforce lowercase URLs, which can lead to duplicate content issues and inconsistent link structures. In this blog, we'll explore how to extend UrlResolver to ensure all generated URLs are in lowercase.

Building an Interactive Hotspot Editor in Optimizely CMS 12

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 16:06:00 GMT

Have you ever wanted to let content editors place interactive hotspots directly on an image—without leaving the CMS? In this post, I’ll walk through how we built a custom Hotspot Module in Optimizely CMS 12 that does exactly that. What We BuiltThis solution allows editors to:* Upload a background image.* Click directly on the imageContinue reading

Custom ContentArea Converter for Optimizely CMS 12 in a Headless + PaaS Architecture

Wed, 15 May 2024 16:48:00 GMT

When building headless websites with Optimizely CMS 12 using the Content Delivery API, ContentArea properties can be tricky. By default, they return minimal references to nested content—not the rich, expanded content structures modern frontends need. In this post, I’ll walk through how we solved that by implementing a custom ContentArea converter, giving full control overContinue reading

Enhancing the Authoring Experience: Extending the LinkItem

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:42:03 GMT

The LinkItem field is one of the most demanded properties by the community, allowing editors to effortlessly create and manage links across pages and blocks. It was introduced on CMS 12 – EPiServer.CMS 12.11.0 and this blog post will show how it can be extended to have a better authoring experience. This is how youContinue reading

Optimizely CMS – Allow Forms to Redirect to Media Assets

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 16:41:28 GMT

Optimizely Forms is a powerful add-on that can improve the experience for authors to create custom forms as needed with plenty of capabilities. It can be also extensible, so a developer can implement custom form elements and add complex logic to forms to accommodate the user’s needs and the client’s requirements. Forms can be configuredContinue reading

Optimizely CMS 11 – Download Blob items from Production

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:26:07 GMT

This post will walk you through the process of getting the blob assets from production to get the images working locally.

Optimizely CMS 12 – Unable to Import Data

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 15:10:16 GMT

Are you unable to import data from another instance? If you are getting a non-explanatory error message “No file uploaded” when you click on “Upload and Verify File” or “Begin Import”, this post will help you. I exported some content items from a lower environment and I wanted to import them to an upper environment,Continue reading

Restricting Environment Access “/Episerver”

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 17:37:10 GMT

As a web administrator, you would probably want to restrict the editing portal to the public and one way to achieve this is applying rules directly on yout configuration file so the access can be restricted by IP. You probably have read this article from Optimizely (CMS 11) https://docs.developers.optimizely.com/digital-experience-platform/v1.3.0-DXP-for-CMS11-COM13/docs/restricting-environment-access where it describes how you canContinue reading

Hide Field From Local Block

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 19:57:17 GMT

There are times when you have a local block that is shared across multiple blocks or pages and you want to hide a specific field based on the content type. Here is a guide on how you can achieve this with a custom attribute. Imagine that you have a block which used by other contentContinue reading

Optimizely Forms Issue with Claims

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 01:43:38 GMT

This is a quick fix for an Optimizely Form issue when your implementation integrates Azure AD with OpenID Connect to sign-in/sign-out users on your application. If you try to browse your page that contains an Optimizely Form and there is an active user session, you could probably get the following error: A claim of typeContinue reading

Invalidate Cache After Publishing

Mon, 31 May 2021 07:47:26 GMT

In order to improve performance and enhace the page loading time while using Search and Navigation, Optimizely provides an extension to cache the search results for a specific period of time. StaticallyCacheFor lets you store your query results, using a timestamp, in a cache with an auto-generated key. Once the defined timestamp has reached, theContinue reading

Allowed Types By Interface

Sat, 15 May 2021 14:44:25 GMT

Sometimes, you will have a flexible content area where you will be able to add a large number of blocks. In this blog post, I will show you how you can replace a large list of allowed types in a property by using an interface. First, let’s go with a real scenario, where we haveContinue reading

Exact Time Picker

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 22:48:33 GMT

Time picker field is always useful when authors need to manage the time separated from the date. Episerver stores dates as UTC and it dynamically displays the datetime of the content editor’s machine but what happen if time zone is also managed as a separated field. In this post I will show you how canContinue reading

Add Link to Edit Media Asset Fields

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 20:04:00 GMT

Finding a media asset sometimes can be challenging if the management is not well-done. Use an EditorDescriptor to let your content authors find you assets easily.

Date Range Facets

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 17:00:00 GMT

Faceted search adds powerful search functionality to websites and allows web users to narrow down the results in a listing page, letting the users find what they really want. Sometimes, we need to add a date range facet as part of our search page. This post will give you some guidance on how to create facets based on DateTime fields using Episerver Search & Navigation (formerly called Episerver Find).