Slots are containers that you can use to display and manage dynamic items on your Web sites. You use targeting servlet beans to include slots in site pages, and you use scenarios to fill them with content.
Note that you can use targeting servlet beans without slots to display dynamic content. However, slots provide more power and flexibility than targeters. Slots have better caching capabilities, which can make displaying content faster. In addition, because you use scenarios to display items in your slots, you can take advantage of scenario features to help you manage the delivery of dynamic content. For example, scenarios allow you to set up an empty slot that generates its own request for content when a site visitor displays the page. With slots, you can also display content other than repository items.
You can set up slots as components that you register with Nucleus, or you can send them as properties of JMS messages.
The process of creating and setting up a slot has the following steps:
Create the slot component.
Add an appropriate targeting servlet bean (for example,
TargetingForEach) to the page or pages where you want the slot to appear. In theTargeterproperty of the bean, specify the slot component. See the ATG Page Developer's Guide for information on how to do this.Create a scenario that specifies the content you want to display in the slot and defines the circumstances in which the content appears. See the ATG Personalization Guide for Business Users for information on this step.
This chapter contains the following sections:
