QRCodes for your EPiServer CMS pages

After a month of parental leave (following the release of AllansSon R2 in january) I’m finally getting to the bottom of the huge pile of emails that was waiting for me when I came back – and thought I’d celebrate it with this quick blog-post. While on parental leave I found a few moments in between diaper-changing to put together this little edit-mode plugin that will produce QR Codes.

As I’m sure all of you know, QR Codes are 2D bar-codes that can hold up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters and can be read with many different devices. A popular use is to store URL’s in them, put them on printed material, so people can just scan them with their cell-phone and then open a URL in the mobile browser.

To make it easier to do this, I used the free Google Chart API that supports QR codes and plugged it in. By default, when you open the QRCode tab, it will suggest the public url to the current page as the text to encode. But you are free to change this of course. It can be any URL or textual message. A typical usage might be to include a query-parameter in the URL like “?from=qrcode-businesscard” so you can later personalize content to the visitors that arrive at your site from the QRCode like this:

Once you have generated the QRCode, you can just copy the image and use it wherever you want.

The project is still pretty rough – hardcoded texts, and so on. If there’s interest I can put it on codeplex and we can turn it completely opensource.

Until then, I’ll include full source here for download – and I’ll put a package on our nuget feed soon.