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The Recommendation Bundle extends the functionality of eZ with a recommendation engine, powered by YOOCHOOSE. It allows you to track the way visitors use your website and suggests recommended content to them based on their behavior.

Info
See https://yoochoose.com/Personalization-Solution/Documentation to learn how the recommendation engine works from the YOOCHOOSE side.

Installing the Recommendation Bundle

The Recommendation Bundle is installed in a similar way as any other Symfony bundle.

Requirements

  • PHP 5.4.4 or higher PHP 5.x version
  • Symfony 2.7 or higher Symfony 2.x version
  • eZ Platform/Enterprise 2015.01 or above, with the REST API configured to use sessions and publicly open to the YOOCHOOSE servers
  • A YOOCHOOSE license

This bundle is independent from the ezrecommendation extension used in legacy, and does not require it.

Step 1: Installation

1. Run the following from your eZ Platform installation root (here with most recent 1.x release):

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languagephp
composer require --no-update ezsystems/recommendation-bundle:^1.0.0
composer update --prefer-dist

2. Enable the bundle in app/AppKernel.php:

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languagephp
$bundles = array(
    // existing bundles
    new EzSystems\RecommendationBundle\EzSystemsRecommendationBundle()
);

3. Import additional routing by adding following lines to your routing.yml file:

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languagephp
recommendationBundleRestRoutes:
    resource: "@EzSystemsRecommendationBundle/Resources/config/routing_rest.yml"
    prefix:   %ezpublish_rest.path_prefix%

Step 2: Configuration

The bundle's configuration is siteaccess aware. This is an example of settings (config.yml):

Code Block
ez_recommendation:
    system:
        default:
            yoochoose:
                customer_id: "12345"
                license_key: "1234-5678-9012-3456-7890"
            server_uri: "http://example.com"
            recommender:
                included_content_types: ["blog", "article"]

The following parameters need to be included in the settings file:

ParameterDescription
yoochoose.customer_idYour YOOCHOOSE customer ID.
yoochoose.license_keyYour YOOCHOOSE license key.
server_uriThe URI your site's REST API can be accessed from.
recommender.included_content_typesContent Types on which the tracking script will be shown. See Tracking below for more information.

If content's author or image are stored in different field, you can specify it in parameters.yml:

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titleFormat
    ez_recommendation.field_identifiers:
        {field fetched by controller (image or author)}
             {content type}: {field with value}

For example:

Code Block
titleActual example
    ez_recommendation.field_identifiers:
         author:
             article: authors
         image:
             article: thumbnail
             blog_post: main_image

Advanced configuration

You can select advanced options for YOOCHOOSE backend using the following settings:

Code Block
ez_recommendation:
    api_endpoint: 'https://admin.yoochoose.net'
    recommender:
        api_endpoint: 'http://reco.yoochoose.net'
        consume_timeout: 20
    tracking:
        api_endpoint: 'http://event.yoochoose.net'
        script_url: 'cdn.yoochoose.net/yct.js'

Changing any of these parameters without a valid reason will break all calls to YOOCHOOSE. It can be useful to test the API by mocking the service, or if you have a hosted version of YOOCHOOSE Recommendation service.

Step 3: Clear prod cache

While Symfony dev environment keeps track of changes to yml files, prod does not, so to make sure Symfony reads the new config we clear cache:

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languagebash
php app/console --env=prod clear:cache

Using the Recommendation Bundle

Initial Setup

Your content structure must be mapped to the YOOCHOOSE domain model. This must be done in collaboration with YOOCHOOSE.

Indexing

Public content is automatically indexed. When necessary, eZ Platform will notify YOOCHOOSE of changes to content. Initial import is to be managed with your YOOCHOOSE sales representative. Note that your server's REST API will need to be open to the YOOCHOOSE servers for indexing to be possible.

Anchor
Tracking
Tracking
Tracking

Events from the site need to be sent to YOOCHOOSE so that recommendations can be adapted to visitors. Tracking can be set up in multiple ways, depending on existing constraints.

EzRecommendationBundle delivers a Twig extension which helps integrate the tracking functionality into your site.

To enable tracking

1. Place the following snippet of code somewhere in the HEAD section of your header template:

Code Block
{% if content is defined %}
    {{ yc_track_user(content.id) }}
{% endif %}

2. Configure settings under the recommender.included_content_types parameter (see the default_settings.yml file delivered with this bundle). Here you can define for which content types tracking script will be shown.

Tip

You can find more information about tracking in YOOCHOOSE documentation.

Displaying

In order to allow displaying recommendations on your site you must add portions of scripts which will integrate the recommender engine with your site.

Implementation is very easy and can be performed in just a few steps (assuming that the EzRecommendationBundle is properly configured and enabled in EzPublishKernelAppKernel.php):

To enable displaying recommendations

1. Add the following JavaScript assets to your header template:

Code Block
{% javascripts
    ...

    '%kernel.root_dir%/../vendor/components/handlebars.js/handlebars.min.js'
    '@EzSystemsRecommendationBundle/Resources/public/js/recommendationtemplaterenderer.js'
    '@EzSystemsRecommendationBundle/Resources/public/js/recommendationtemplatehelper.js'
    '@EzSystemsRecommendationBundle/Resources/public/js/recommendationrestclient.js'
%}

2. Place a dedicated Twig helper in the place where you want to display recommendations:

Code Block
{{ yc_show_recommendations(
    contentId = content.id,
    scenario = '',
    limit = '',
    contentType = '',
    template = '',
    fields = []
) }}

Parameters

ParameterTypeDescription
contentIdintIn content-based views the Twig variable holding the content id (the content you want to get recommendations for).
scenariostringScenario used to display recommendations. You can create custom scenarios at the YOOCHOOSE dashboard.
limitintNumber of recommendations to show.
contentTypestringContent Types you are expecting in response.
templatestringHandleBars template name (your templates are stored in the EzRecommendationBundle/Resources/public/views directory. Take a look at default.html.twig which includes a default template that can be used to prepare customized versions).
fieldsarrayFields which are required and will be requested from the recommender engine. These field names are also used inside HandleBars templates.
Info

Sample integration can take the following form:

Code Block
{{ yc_show_recommendations(
    contentId = content.id,
    scenario = 'popular',
    limit = 5,
    contentType = 'article',
    template = 'default',
    fields = ['ez_publishedDate', 'ez_url', 'title', 'image', 'author', 'intro']
) }}

You can also bypass named arguments using standard value passing as arguments.

Item ID

The item id is usually set to the viewed ContentId. Depending on requirements, it can be set to a different value, in collaboration with YOOCHOOSE.

Tip

If you want to access a specific image alias through API, you need to add the image parameter to the request url with name of alias as its value, for example:

/api/ezp/v2/ez_recommendation/v1/contenttypes/16?lang=eng-GB&fields=title,description,image,intro,name&page=1&page_size=20&image=rss

to retrieve the rss alias of the image.

Status
colourYellow
titlev1.6

As of v1.6, one more parameter is available: sa, which takes the siteaccess name and defines the siteaccess whose content will be displayed.

Note
titleDisplaying image aliases

Displaying image variations defined with image aliases is not currently supported out-of-the-box.

You can work around this limitation by creating your own template (based on https://github.com/ezsystems/ezstudio-demo/blob/master/app/Resources/EzSystemsRecommendationBundle/views/recommendations.html.twig) or your own Twig extension (based on https://github.com/ezsystems/EzSystemsRecommendationBundle/blob/master/Twig/RecommendationTwigExtension.php#L214).

Troubleshooting

Most operations are logged via the ez_recommendation Monolog channel. To log everything about Recommendation to dev.recommendation.log, add the following to your config.yml:

Code Block
monolog:
    handlers:
        ez_recommendation:
            type:   stream
            path:   "%kernel.logs_dir%/%kernel.environment%.recommendation.log"
            channels: [ez_recommendation]
            level: info
Tip
You can replace info by debug for more verbosity.

 

 

In this topic:

Table of Contents
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Further information:

API doc for YOOCHOOSE Service

Developer Guides for YOOCHOOSE Service