Dynamic Content is an exciting new feature in Elastic Path 6.1.1. The idea behind it is to give the Marketing team more control over site content without having to make changes to code (Java or HTML). There is still some initial work for the web developer to enable Dynamic Content in the storefront, and if your organization has special requirements, it's definitely possible for developers to extend the Dynamic Content framework (more on this in a future post), but control over Dynamic Content is mainly in the hands of Marketing. In a nutshell, here's how it works:

• The web developer sets up some locations (called Content Spaces) within the web page for displaying Dynamic Content.
• The EP administrator registers the Content Space in the Commerce Manager.
• The Marketing person selects some content (a banner image, a Flash object) to display in the storefront.
• The Marketing person chooses the Content Space where the content will appear and sets the conditions for displaying it (the who, when, and where).
  

And Elastic Path Commerce takes care of the rest. Let's take a closer look at how this works in practice.

Setting up a Content Space

The web developer creates the HTML page layout of the storefront in the Velocity templates. Within the HTML, the web developer can include the contentspace macro. This looks something like the following:

#contentspace('contentSpaceID', '<span>Alternative Content</span>')

This defines a Content Space, which can be used to display Dynamic Content. The first parameter is the Content Space ID, which will need to be registered before it can be used. The second parameter is the static content to display if there's no Dynamic Content mapped to the space.

If you have 6.1.1 installed and you've set up the demo store data, you can see some examples of Content Spaces in the storefront home page template (themes\electronics\default\templates\velocity\index.vm under your assets directory). For more information on setting up Content Spaces, see the Developer Guide.

Registering a Content Space

The EP administrator registers the Content Space in the Commerce Manager so that it can be used as a target for Dynamic Content. To do this, log in to Commerce Manager and choose Activity->Configuration. Then click Content Spaces under Targeted Selling. Click the Create Content Space button. Set the name to the Content Space ID used in the Velocity template. You should also enter a meaningful description, something that will help users determine where the Content Space is, its preferred dimensions, etc. For more details, see the Developer Guide or the Commerce Manager User Guide.

Creating Dynamic Content

Next, Marketing selects the type of content they want to display in the storefront. Out of the box, Elastic Path Commerce supports several types. For example, there are types for displaying images and Flash objects. There's also a type for displaying HTML. And developers can easily create more types. These types, also called Content Wrappers, aren't simply static content. They can include Groovy code to do just about anything you can imagine. And you don't need to restart the storefront to make changes to them. (You can find out more about custom Content Wrappers in the Content Wrappers section in the Developer Guide.)

After selecting a type, there's usually some configuration required. For example, for a clickable image type, you'd need to select an image file and set the URL where shoppers will be redirected when they click the image.

There's a tutorial that will walk you through the process of creating Dynamic Content. (For the tutorial, you'll need to either install the Trial Installer or to set up the demo store data in your dev environment.)

Setting up the Dynamic Content Delivery

The last step is to set up the conditions for displaying the content. We want to make sure that the content will be displayed in the right place (which Content Space), to the right shoppers, at the right time, and in the right store (for example, display this content to shoppers who followed a link from Google after searching for the keyword "clogs").

The details of configuring Dynamic Content Delivery are covered in the tutorial on creating Dynamic Content and in the Commerce Manager User Guide.

Behind the scenes, Dynamic Content Delivery relies heavily on the Tagging Framework to get information about the shopper and decide which pieces of content to display. In future posts, we'll dig a bit deeper into the customizable aspects of both Dynamic Content and the Tagging Framework. Until then, be sure to check out the 6.1.1 documentation on the Elastic Path doc site for more in-depth coverage of Dynamic Content.