The Optimizely Graph SDK Just Made Your Find Migration a Lot Less Scary When I wrote about CMS 13 in early March, the Search & Navigation to Graph migration was the item I told partners to respect the most. Not because Graph is bad. We've been building on it at WOW for over a year. But because the old Graph .NET
eCommerce How We Architect Search on Optimizely Commerce Builds: Graph, Coveo, and Knowing When You Need Both Most CMS platforms ship with no search at all. You get a content management system, and then you're on your own figuring out how visitors are going to find anything. Optimizely is an exception. Between Search & Navigation (Find, to those of us who've been around
Optimizely Optimizely CMS 13: What Partners Need to Know Before the Upgrade Update, April 2026: I originally published this post in early March while CMS 13 was still in preview. CMS 13 went GA on March 31, and several details I speculated on turned out differently. Rather than quietly editing, I've corrected the specifics inline and flagged what changed. I&
AI The robots.txt Moment for AI: Why Every Website Will Need an Open MCP Manifest A departure from Optimizely into the emerging agentic web In 1994, a Dutch software engineer named Martijn Koster proposed a simple text file that would change the web forever. The robots.txt standard gave website owners a way to communicate with automated crawlers — telling them what they could and couldn&
Opal I Just Got My Optimizely Opal Certification (And Here's What Actually Matters) This Tuesday I was in Chicago for Operation Opal—one of the final stops on Optimizely's world tour dedicated entirely to their AI platform. That alone should tell you something. This isn't a feature announcement or a beta program. Optimizely is putting serious weight behind Opal,
Optimizely Building a Modern eCommerce Platform with Optimizely PaaS and Next.js SaaS Frontend - Part 3: Testing, Deployment & Monitoring Introduction & Testing Strategy Overview In Part 1 and Part 2, we covered the architecture and frontend implementation of our headless eCommerce platform. Now it's time to tackle the operational side—the testing, deployment, and monitoring strategies that make this architecture production-ready. Testing a headless architecture presents unique
Optimizely Building a Modern eCommerce Platform with Optimizely PaaS and Next.js SaaS Frontend – Part 2: Frontend Implementation Introduction & Setup In Part 1, we explored the high-level architecture of our headless eCommerce platform—why we chose Optimizely PaaS for the backend and Next.js for the frontend, and how we structured the overall system for scalability and developer experience. Now we’ll dive into the frontend implementation—
Optimizely Part 2 – Extending Optimizely Opal with Custom Tools and Agents In Part 1 we looked at Opal’s role as an AI workflow manager in the Optimizely stack. Now let’s go deeper and see how you can extend Opal with your own code. Opal isn’t just a chat interface — it can call out to custom HTTP endpoints (“tools”
AI Optimizely Opal: AI Assistant and Workflow Manager for the Modern DXP Introduction Most AI assistants today focus on point productivity—generating text, summarizing documents, or suggesting code. These tools are useful, but they’re still single-task helpers. They don’t manage context across systems, and they rarely align with enterprise workflows. Optimizely Opal is different. Instead of acting as one assistant,
Optimizely Building a Modern eCommerce Platform with Optimizely PaaS and Next.js SaaS Frontend: Part 1 – Architecture Overview Introduction When you're building a modern eCommerce experience, it's tempting to reach for familiar tools. But monoliths break down fast under real-world load—especially when content teams and developers are moving at different speeds. We wanted something better. So we built a platform that combines Optimizely’
