IBM Portal, WCM & Personalization

Question

I am trying to plugin in an alternate WCM to the IBM Websphere Portal and thus trying to understand the existing IBM WCM architecture.A major component of this work is Personalization (PZN).Need to understand the following:

1. How can we use ContentSpots to retrieve content from a configured IBM WCM. The idea is to assign this content spot as a markup on a transaction portlet, along with other non-wcm based UI markup So it is not same as 100% Content Only portlet. The content spots would obviously have the rules or Campaigns assigned, so that the content pulled from WCM via this content spot get those rules applied to.

2. How do we use the IBM WCM taglib to retrieve personalized content from WCM i.e. to retrieve content as a ResourceCollection that has the personalization rule assigned. As I see now, we can just pull the content using WCM Taglib, dont see how that content has the pzn rules applied?

Thanks

Answer 1

-So firstly let me explain the relationship between content spots, rules and resource collections. The minimum you would need to implement you're use case.

Diagram

Content spots invoke a rule and return results. They have a default rule mapping, but you can set the desired rule on ContentSpot from your portlet that you want to invoke.

Rules use attributes etc and return results from a Resource Collection(Web Content is an OOB Resource colllection, so this part is easy).

Resource Collection is used to access data that can be queried from the rules. Ex: Web Content, databases etc

So you'll start by creating some WCM content let's say a bunch of news articles. You will define some PZN rules to conditionally select these content items let's say based on created date or any condition. You will then create a content spot and set this rule as a default rule on ContentSpot. Then just call the content spot from you're jsp code.

-I havent used WCM taglibs extensively but if you know how to pull content using WCM tags, you can create "PZN WCM component" to call a PZN rule(which inturn could be returning the web content) and call that PZN wcm component from wcm tags.