Introduction to CMS Restrictions, Often Referred to as "Static Personalization" in SAP Commerce Cloud
In SAP Commerce Cloud, web content managers have various ways to personalize their Web site content for customers.
In this lesson, we focus on CMS restrictions. Think of them as specific rules applicable to components and pages. When applied after matching a predefined condition, they change the visual appearance of a page or a component. On the component level, a customer might see other components, and/or the original ones might be hidden. On the page level, a customer would simply see a different page, also known as a variation page, which contains different components.
A typical example is showing a "Christmas Sale" banner during Advent. A variation of a page for a dedicated user group is another. Letting a category page show different components than usual, but only for a specific category, is another possible scenario.
Because the conditions which trigger a restriction are predefined and not changed by user behavior on the storefront, we often refer to these restrictions as "Static Personalization".
Note
Other approaches to personalization, e. g. "Dynamic Personalization" will be covered in the following lessons. Personalization with custom code or with support of integrated tools like SAP Emarsys or intelligent selling services for SAP Commerce Cloud (ISS) will be touched in the last lesson of this unit.
Types of Restrictions
There are three out-of-the-box restriction types manageable within SmartEdit:
- Time Restrictions
Time restrictions limit a component or a variation page to being visible only within a certain date and time range. Outside the defined range, the component or variation page is not displayed. In this case, the primary page is shown instead.
But it can also be the other way around. The component or variation page will explicitly NOT be displayed during the specified time range.
For example, Laura wants to display a Christmas-related image in December. She creates a corresponding banner component in Basic or Advanced Edit mode. In the Visibility tab, she sets ‘Display component’ to True and creates a Time Restriction, where she sets the date time to, for example:
Dec 1, 00:00 am until Dec 25, 11:59 pm this year.
After doing so, she can sync the page and test the results with the Preview Selector.
Let’s see how this looks in SmartEdit:
- Usergroup Restrictions
Usergroup restrictions, as the name suggests, either allow or deny a component or a variation page to be visible to members of a specific user group. User groups comprise members who share some common characteristics like gender, address, and so on.
Laura could, for example, show an additional product carousel on the home page, populated with the newest digital cameras for the user group "tech-lovers". At the same time, all users (including the tech-lovers) still see the original carousel with a mixture of trending and discounted products. Laura isn't responsible for assigning users to their groups: she assigns one or more existing user groups to a restriction.
Let’s see in the following image how that example could be set up with just a few steps in SmartEdit.
- Category Restrictions
Category restrictions limit a component or page to only being visible when certain categories are being viewed.
This restriction is less intuitive, so let’s use an example to illustrate:
Category pages usually look the same, structure wise, but with different content/categories listed. If Laura wants to change this behavior for a specific category, she can add a category restriction. The restriction's effect is that any customer visiting this category sees a variation page. This page may show a dedicated banner or other UI component changes.
Let’s observe this example executed by Laura in the next video:
In essence, she creates a new category restriction for the Camera Accessories & Supplies category. On the variation page based on the same template, she creates a promotion banner–to make it look different from the original category page. The changed variation page is displayed when the customer is viewing the restricted category.
Step-by-Step Video Content: Apply a Category Restriction to a Variation Page
- Laura selects a CategoryPage called Product List.
- In Basic or Advanced Edit, she clones the actual page, making it a variation page that reuses existing components.
- Laura creates a Category Restriction, adds categories to it, including their sub-categories, and applies the restriction to the new variation page. As a result, the new variation category page is created. At first, it looks exactly the same as the original primary page. But because of the new restriction, it can only be displayed for its categories.
- Laura adds a banner to the variation page. If she uses a page slot location, it's a simple change in Basic Edit mode.
Note
If she uses a shared slot instead, she must replace it with an unshared slot. Otherwise, the change to the variation page would be visible on all pages derived from its template. This change would affect the primary page, but could also affect many other pages, too.
- After synchronization, the variation page becomes visible in the storefront for the categories defined in its restriction.
Now, let’s refer to the video that covers this topic:
Note
You probably noticed the number of restrictions in the restrictions wizard. There are far more than the three restriction types covered so far. Although they're listed there, they can’t be managed in SmartEdit and are out of scope for this e-learning.
