New datatype for recommendation

A new datatype has been created for the recommendation service. When you install the eZ Recommendation extension the datatype Recommendation is available. You can see it when you edit an existing/new class in the backend of your eZ Publish installation:

You can edit any existing class and add a Recommendation entry. This enables this class to be tracked and recommended by the eZ recommender service in the future.

We provide you with new classes already including the Recommendation datatype for demonstration purposes. The new classes are copied from article (main-page), product and image except that they have additional Recommendation data entries. A package with these classes is located in the extensions doc folder. We created one more class named folder for recommendation. This class is a copy of the folder class without changes. This shall be used to create dedicated templates overrides for this class, as described later.

You can see the new recommendation classes the available classes list.

Now edit e.g. Article for recommendation and scroll down until you find the recommendation entry in this class.

Comment: The fields in the recommendation entry vary according to the solution you selected in the ezyoochoose.ini settings (solution=shop or solution=publisher, see below). The screenshot below was taken with a publisher account.

There are several entries defining how the extension operates, tracks user activities and delivers content information to the eZ Recommender engine. The lower part of the Recommendation entry (see below) defines which information about a content object is transmitted to the eZ Recommender engine and how the data is mapped between the eZ Publish class and the datatypes that can be interpreted by the eZ Recommendation service.

´Recommend´ check box

It is strongly recommended to check this box in the class definition and make Recommend the default for any object in this class. You can later change this flag for each individual object if you do not want to include a specific node into the recommendation service.

Check this box to enable recommendations for all objects of the class as a default. After an object is enabled for recommendation each user activity on this object creates a tracking event. This means that you can only see tracking events after you included recommendation into at least one class and created objects of this class.

If you want to test this you now either create objects of the class Article for recommendation or include the recommendation datatype into an existing class of yours e.g. article (main-page).

´Export content (for recommendation)´ check box

It is strongly recommended to check this box in the class definition and make ´Export content´ the default for any object in this class.

Check this box to enable the transmission of content information like ´title´, ´author´, ´publish date´ to the eZ Recommendation service. Each time you publish a recommendable object, an eZ Publish workflow will be triggered (see ´Export content after publishing´) checking whether the export content flag is set. If ´yes´ it will export the defined meta-data (below) to the eZ Recommendation service.