After you have set up profile groups and content groups, you need to tell the system which content groups to show to whom and the circumstances in which to do it. One way to do this is by setting up content targeters, which are business rules that you create through the Targeting > Content Targeters window in the ATG Control Center. Content targeters define the content that you display to each profile group.
A content targeter can contain two kinds of business rules: show and hide. Each rule type is made up of specific conditions related to content, people, time, and environmental factors and generally reads as follows: Show/Hide this content… to/from these people… at these times… under these conditions. For example, let’s say you wanted to show new feature articles (in a content group called newMemberFeatures) to registered site users (in a profile group called registeredMembers) every Monday. In this case, you might create a targeter called newFeatures with the following rule set:
Show this content:
items in group newMemberFeatures
to these people:
people in group registeredMembers
at these times:
every Mon of every month
When this targeter is invoked, it initially looks at all conditions except the content conditions. First, it checks to see if the registeredMembers property in the visitor’s profile is set to “true” (the people condition). If this or any other condition fails, the targeter completely ignores the rule set. If the condition passes, it goes on to see if the current day is a Monday (the time condition). If all of these conditions pass, the targeter looks at the content condition to determine the items to show or hide. In this case, it shows the visitor all items in the newMemberFeatures content group.
After you create a targeter, a page developer uses a targeting servlet bean to embed it in the appropriate site pages so that it will display the specified content to visitors who meet your targeting conditions. (Typically, page developers use the Document Editor window in the ATG Control Center to embed targeters in JHTML or JSP (JavaServer Page) files. For more information, see the Page Developer's Guide.) Once the targeter is in place, you can use Targeting > Preview window to test it on the staging site before moving it to your live server.
Multiple targeters can be used to produce a single Web page. For example, nine separate targeters are invoked to produce the “investor” home page (investorhome.jsp) of the Quincy Funds demo.
Important: If your installation uses ATG Content Administration, it is strongly recommended that you use the Business Control Center instead of the ACC to manage content targeters. In addition, if you are working in a multisite ATG environment (one in which a single instance of ATG products supports more than one Web site), you cannot create or edit site-aware content targeters in the ACC. These must be managed through the Business Control Center. For more information, refer to the Business Control Center User's Guide. For information on a multisite environment, refer to the Multisite Administration Guide.
Using Scenarios to Match Content to Profiles
If you use the Scenarios module, you can match content to profile groups in two ways: you can either create targeters (as described above), or you can use scenarios to achieve essentially the same results. The method you choose depends on whether you require the advanced features that scenarios provide, or whether the slightly simpler features of targeters meet your requirements. You can also set up a combination of the two methods. For information on the differences between the two, see How Are Scenarios Different from Targeters?.
The rest of this chapter describes using targeters to match content to profile groups. For information on using scenarios, see Creating Scenarios.
