A slot is a Nucleus component that you can use to set up and display a series of personalized content items on one or more Web pages. (For more information on Nucleus, refer to the ATG Programming Guide.) As described earlier in this guide, it is possible to create and display personalized content through content targeters; however, slots provide some powerful features not available through targeters.
You can include slots in scenarios, giving you greater control over the circumstances in which they are displayed. For example, you could include Time elements in a scenario that change the slots after a specific period. Using scenarios, you can also set up a type of slot called an active slot that requests its own content, or use another scenario events to determine the content of a slot.
With slots, the system can more efficiently cache the items that it shows, which makes displaying them faster.
Targeters can be used to display repository items only. Slots are often used to show repository items (such as images), but you can also use them to display any of the following:
Text strings
Dates
Numbers (Java types Long and Double)
The type of item that a slot displays is determined by the developer who creates the slot component. Note, however, that a single slot can display only one type of item; for example, a slot cannot contain both a repository item and a date.
