One of the nicest features that came along in the last few Sitecore versions was the rules engine. Along with that power was the ability to harness the conditional sublayout rendering to change the datasource or component design based on specific visitor information, otherwise known as personalization. There's all kinds of identifiable markers that are available to you about your end users such as location and search keywords. You can use this information as is to create rules, you can create "profiles" which categorize your users to help you reach your intended audience and you can use those "profiles" to build "Engagement Plans". I don't plan on going into detail about how to create these profiles or engagement plans since it's a near science unto itself but I did find a quick guide on personalization terms and an excellent articles on setting up personalization profiles and creating engagement plans.
Placeholder settings are used to create predefined insert options for components (sublayouts, renderings and web controls). You have two basic approaches to use: setting the placeholder key on the item's Placeholder Key field:
or setting the key when you apply it to an item through it's presentation details.
After you've decided what components your pages will be broken up into and created the sublayouts (renderings or server controls) each extending your base class, you can begin working on the setup inside Sitecore by configuring your component item's fields and setting up component insert options. These settings are stored on the sublayout items themselves and I'll detail them here.
As a shout out, this series started because I was recently speaking with Mark Ursino and he gave me a demonstration of a recent build where he had taken advantage of a few really slick features in Page Editor. I decided to do some research to see what Page Editor could really do. In doing my research I came across a lot of great posts that individually detail pieces of functionality, some of which I'd seen demonstrated at the last Symposium. Others go in depth to explain why certain choices are lend to a better framework. For this post, I wanted to weave together as much of a cohesive picture along with some commentary and lots of referential links for developers to see a fuller Page Editor experience.