The Recommendation Bundle extends the functionality of eZ Publish 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.

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 Publish Platform 5.4.5 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 Publish installation root (here with most recent 1.x release):

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

2. Enable the bundle in ezpublish/EzPublishKernel.php:

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

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

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):

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:

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

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

For 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:

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:

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 Publish 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:

{% 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.

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 EzPublishKernel.php):

To enable displaying recommendations

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

{% 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:

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

Parameters

{{ 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.

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:

monolog:
    handlers:
        ez_recommendation:
            type:   stream
            path:   "%kernel.logs_dir%/%kernel.environment%.recommendation.log"
            channels: [ez_recommendation]
            level: info