Integrating the Topical Recommendations Module

The Topical Recommendations Module enhances your content delivery by recommending articles that belong to a certain topic. This document provides a detailed guide on how to integrate this module with your system. The process primarily consists of two steps:

  1. Communicating the specific metadata used for marking these items to your Froomle Account Manager.

  2. Informing your Froomle Account Manager about the list_name of the Topical Recommendations module used in recommendation requests.

The subsequent sections elaborate on these steps.

1. Communicating the Topics to your Froomle Account Manager

It is crucial to inform your Froomle Account Manager about the topics for which recommendations are allowed. This can be one or multiple topics.

In a first example, the Topical Recommendations module only recommends articles tagged with coronavirus.

In a second example, the Topical Recommendations moudle only recommends articles that belong to either the category economics or the category foreign policy.

To generate recommendations, Froomle combines the topics with the item’s age. Unless otherwise specified, Froomle will recommend topical items that are:

  • Up to 72 hours old for websites, apps, and daily emails; and

  • Up to 7 days old for weekly emails.

  • Not yet read by the reader.

2. Notifying the list_name of the Topical Recommendations Module to your Froomle Account Manager

To ensure the correct configuration of recommendations, Froomle needs to know the list_name of the editor’s pick module you use when making recommendation requests.

If it concerns a new module, your Account Manager will create the proper list_name and communicate it to you.

If it concerns changes to an existing module, you need to inform your Account Manager about this list_name. This allows Froomle to correctly process any incoming recommendations request for this particular list_name, ensuring accurate generation of topical recommendations.

This means that the configuration of the module happens mostly in the back-end, and that this information does not need to be appended to every request for recommendations.