Have you ever wanted to recommend assets to your users based on what others have rated? With the new Xtivia Asset Recommender portlet, you can do that with ease. Just configure the asset recommender to your needs and it searches your asset ratings for the best recommendations.
App Configuration
This portlet is available in the Liferay Marketplace for CE and EE. Once installed from the Marketplace, you can configure it to work based on your needs.
Under portlet Configuration, select which type of asset you would want to recommend. For this example, I have selected a web content article as shown in the screenshot below.
Under the Setup tab, you can configure how the recommender engine should look for assets based on Asset Type. You can get more information about how User Based and Item Based recommendations work here. The Preference Inferrer option allows the engine to also search for assets you might not have expressed interest in but might still want to see based on other’s ratings. Neighborhood Size controls which assets are to be considered in the search for things to recommend. Lastly, Number of Recommendation limits the results displayed by the portlet.
Once your users start rating assets, you should see results in your recommender portlet like this:
Testing Recommendations
To make sure your recommendations work as you expect, you may want to test your configuration. On a clean installation of Liferay, create 5 users and at least 5 pieces of web content. Configure your recommender portlet as illustrated in the App Configuration section.
Now, with users 1-3, rate all the web content in the asset publisher. For user 4, rate only the first 2 items of web content and you will see that the asset recommender will start recommending the other 3 web content items you haven’t rated.
Viewing Recommended Assets
To view the result. you need to add an Asset Publisher portlet to your page. Open the Configuration for the Asset Publisher portlet, select the Display Settings tab, and set the portlet as the default asset publisher for that page. Then when a user clicks on a recommendation, the content will be displayed in the Asset Publisher. Here’s a page after configuration, showing the “Sakura (train)” asset being displayed after user clicked on the link in the Asset Recommender.
Final Thoughts
The Asset Recommender portlet takes the hassle out of coding your own recommendation portlet. It works out of the box and just needs minor configuration. The portlet integrates seamlessly with the Asset Publisher for viewing the recommendations, as well as the assets that come with Liferay.