A/B Testing with Magnolia

Is it possible to do an A/B testing with Magnolia? The question popups often in the discussions with potential Magnolia users from various e-business companies. This really depends on what you want to test. The design of whole site or just best position for an ad on a single page or layout of one page or ...  If you want to do it on the site level the easiest (with current release - 4.2.3 at the time of writing) is to: create 2 themes, create 2 site definitions, copy the website tree assign original the Site1/Theme1 and Site2/Theme2 to the copy and use Apache to hide the subtrees and redirect half of incoming traffic to one site copy and other half to the other copy based on whatever criteria you want. The main disadvantage of this approach is need to edit every change twice or copy the content from one subtree to another periodically or via observation. Another one is need for reverse proxy and mod_rewrite to translate all the links if you also want to hide the fact that each site is in different subtree.   Easier yet, to setup, but not necessarily to maintain, is to: use just one copy of the content and 2 public instances, on each of the public instances deploy different Site/Theme so depending on from which public instance you access you would see different design/layout and again use the Apache or a load balancer to divide the incoming traffic between public instances. ...

Date: February, 11 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/rah003/archive/2010/02/11/ab-testing-magnolia

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