All posts by Quirijn Slings

Catching items that come back from translation

Tridion

If you are reading this, you probably know that Tridion has an event system which allows you to attach your own custom functionality to pretty much everything that goes down. A typical example is to perform some pre-processing of an item before it is saved.

The customer I work for at the moment had just such a requirement. The only thing was: the pre-processing should only occur if the item in question was updated by SDL’s translation management system. The question is: how can one see that a ‘save’ action was triggered by TMS, and not by a regular user or some other system activity?

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Event system deploy script

Tridion

Developing event system modules is all in a day’s work for a Tridion professional. Deploying your modules is simple enough, but can get quite tedious. You need to shut down services, stop IIS, copy some DLLs to the Tridion bin folder, install other DLLs in the GAC, start IIS, restart services…

Today I got fed up so I wrote a windows batch script that automates all that. It isn’t earth-shattering, just a little thing that might help save you a few minutes of your precious time.

It works ONLY with Tridion 2013 by the way. On 2011 and before, you need to shutdown the COM+ as well, and that is not so easy to do.

Here is how to build a package for your event system, and deploy it with the script.

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Creating custom footprints

SmartTarget, Tridion

After toying with SmartTarget and Fredhopper for a few weeks, I can tell you from personal experience that it’s bloody complicated. Technically, it’s all nice enough, but there are so many (sub)systems involved and documentation and config files are all over the place.

So I thought it might help people if I explained how to perform some basic tasks. Today, we’ll be creating our own ‘footprint’. In case you don’t know what footprints are, checkout this post.

Quick summary: a footprint is a way for an editor / content manager / marketer to override the claims which are used to determine which personalized content items to show. Oh, and by the way: footprints are available within Experience Manager only!
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Using footprints to preview a personalized site

SmartTarget, Tridion

Ever since the acquisition of the ecommerce search and recommendation engine Fredhopper by SDL in 2010, the market has eagerly anticipated what the result of this merger would mean for them. The combination of Tridion and Fredhopper was released in 2011 and baptized SmartTarget. But it wasn’t until the release of the latest version, SmartTarget 2014 SP1, that this integration was seen as stable and production-ready.
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SmartTarget 2014 SP1 and DD4T in a Java environment

DD4T, SmartTarget, Tridion

As Nick Roussakov explains in his excellent post, it is very easy to integrate DD4T and SmartTarget 2014 – at least, no harder than it is to implement SmartTarget on any type of system.

If you are implementing the java version of DD4T things are even easier. First of all, you can simply add the out of the box Add to SmartTarget TBB to a dynamic DD4T component template. This will make sure that the component presentation is available in FredHopper – as described by Nick.
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