Component personalization

This page describes component personalization, adapting the content of a component to the visitor according to his or her personal preferences, needs and capabilities.

Personalization at the level of components works the same way as page personalization except that you are personalizing a smaller item.

Magnolia Hands on Demo: Personalization (April 19, 2022)

You can personalize a page and its components at the same time. The feature is disabled by default. To enable it, set /modules/personalization-components/config/allowNestedVariants to true.

Personalizing a component

Component personalization is possible through the following actions in the Component action bar:

Add component variant
Choose audience
Hide/Show original
Delete component variant
Delete all component variants

Adding a variant

If the selected component hasn’t been personalized yet, only the Add component variant option will be available:

Adding component variant in action bar

To add a new variant to a component, click Add component variant. The variant icon and the default label variant-0 appear in the component bar:

Variant in the component bar

The original component content is renamed to Original. Click on the variant-0 label to view and access the list of variants and the original from the pop-up menu that appears.

Changing between variants

If not associated with any target audience, the newly added variant of the component is named automatically by Magnolia (variant-0). Once the target audience is defined and associated with the variant, the name of the audience is displayed in place of the automatically generated name. This version of the component will be displayed to page visitors if no audience trait can be matched with the personalization properties assigned to the other variant(s) of the component.

Adding a variant to a component will affect its publishing status as well as the publishing status of its parent area and parent page: all of these are changed to modified (yellow) because creating a variant is considered an edit action on the component.

When a page has content variants for some of its components, the variants icon appears in the top bar of the page in the Edit and Preview views and next to the name of the page in the page tree view.

Editing a variant

After a variant has been published, you will see the green circle in the status column in the Pages app.

Pages app publication status

Let’s say we want to add another phone number to the contacts in our EMEA variant. We open the contact: Europe, Middle East & Africa variant, go to the component we want to modify, click on the edit icon , add the new number, and Save changes.

Modifying the variant

In the component itself, we can see a yellow circle that tells us that this component has been modified.

Modified status in the component

Back in the Pages app, the publishing status for the variant we have just edited also turned from a green circle to a yellow one. This means that the modification needs to be published.

Modified status in the Pages app

To do so, select the modified variant and click on Publish in the action bar. This will open a dialog where you should insert a comment briefly describing the changes made to the variant, and then click the green Publish button

Now, these changes are pending approval by the editor. Once they are approved and published following the workflow, the publication status changes to a green circle once again.

Choosing an audience

Select the Choose audience option in the Action bar to choose the target audience for a component variant. Selecting a component variant is a prerequisite to choosing an audience for the variant.

it is not possible to choose an audience for the Original version of the component.

Hiding the original

The Original content of a component can be marked as `ORIGINAL – HIDDEN''. When marked as hidden, the content associated with the `ORIGINAL will only be visible in the page Edit view.

Why hide the original? Hiding the original can be useful in a scenario in which the content is exclusive, targeting a particular audience. If no variants match, the original (fallback) content will be hidden. To hide/show the content of a component, select the Hide/Show original option in the Action bar.

Changing the template of a personalized component

You can serve different content to different audiences by changing the template used in a personalized component. This enables you to serve text to one audience, an image to another audience, video to a third audience and so on. To change the template of a component variant, select the variant you want to change in the component bar and click Change template in the Action bar. A dialog opens where you can choose the template you want to apply to the component variant.

Deleting a variant or all variants

There are three ways to delete a variant:

Select the component variant you want to delete in the variant pop-up menu and click on Delete component variant.
Delete all component variants.
Delete the component itself. However, in this case, also any other variant of the component is also deleted. This deletion can only be undone by restoring an earlier version of the page.

After the deletion of the component, the publishing status of the parent area and the parent page change to modified (yellow) because deleting a component is considered an edit action on the page.

Permissions

Disable personalization in a component template

Set the personalizable property to false in the component template to disable personalization. This disables the Add component variant action. You may disable personalization in components that must display the exact same content such as legal boilerplate text to all visitors. All components can be personalized by default.

my-module/templates/components/html.yaml

renderType: freemarker
templateScript: /my-module/components/html.ftl
dialog: my-module:components/html
deletable: false
writable: false
moveable: false
personalizable: false

Grant component personalization permission to a role

Define which roles are allowed personalize components. Name the roles in your area definition.

areas:
  myArea:
    availableComponents:
      myComponent:
        id: my-module:components/myComponent
        permissions:
          write:
            roles: [editors, superuser]
          move:
            roles: [senior-editor, superuser]
          delete:
            roles: [editors, superuser]
          personalize:
            roles: [senior-editor, superuser]

Enable personalized components in personalized pages

You can personalize a page and its components at the same time. This feature is disabled by default. To enable it, set /modules/personalization-components/config/allowNestedVariants to true.

Enabling personalized components in personalized pages