In a recent article I reviewed different content listing patterns commonly found on websites and how those patterns could be reimagined with content delivered by a recommender as a service. In short, the article made a case for recommender systems in situations where recent, popularity, similarity or relevancy were important to the use case. In practice this applies to use cases such as search, top picks, trending now, recently added and related content.
At Morpht we wanted to put these ideas into practice and therefore decided to build a proof of concept website showcasing what could be done. So, at our recent team building catchup we decided to see how far we could get with an implementation based on Recombee (for the recommendation engine), GovCMS SaaS (as the code base) and CivicTheme as the front-end theme. Over the course of a few days (give or take) we were able to put together the example site and GovFlix is the end result.
GovFlix is a small demonstration site built around video content situated in the “government technology” space. The content has been designed to appeal to an audience interested in the web and content management for the government. We found a number of videos on YouTube and then built the content in the site around that.
The end result is a site which makes use of a number of scenarios to deliver more engaging and relevant content to users. The scenarios are as follows:
- Search
- Top picks
- Recently added
- Trending now
- Related.
I encourage you to take a minute or two to look around the site to see how it operates.
The technology behind GovFlix
GovCMS
The website is build in GovCMS SaaS. Those familiar with GovCMS will know that it shops with a small and useful set of modules. It is not possible to add extra modules, without stepping up to the more flexible GovCMS PaaS option. Making the site work on GovCMS SaaS was a requirement and so we needed to adapt some of our approaches to get things to work.
Firstly, we implemented a JSON catalogue feed which could be used to push content updates out. these could then be consumed by Recombee. This avoided the need to use a module such as Search API Recombee.
Secondly, we implemented Recombee Search and Recombee Scenario paragraph bundles to manage the configuration and display of the recommendations. Implementing the logic this way avoided the need to use the Recombee module which was implemented using standard core blocks.
Content model
The efficacy of the recommendations is improved by maintaining a rich item index in Recombee. In practice, this means that the catalogue feed needs to include important fields which can be used for content similarity calculations and filtering. The feed therefore included properties for title, date, summary, thumbnail, link, body, topics, audiences and type. These fields add a richness to the items which makes the recommendations a lot better.
CivicTheme
CivicTheme is becoming a more popular choice for Australian government agencies when building sites. Moprht was able to utilise the work we have done with Convivial for GovCMS (our starter site) which was already based on CivicTheme. At the start of the build we cloned out the site and was ready to go with the foundations for the build.
Recombee
Recombee is the recommendations service which powers the personalised results which are shown to users. A new database was created and content was populated across into the item index via the catalogue feed. We created the above scenarios, fine tuned them and then were ready to go. The scenarios were implemented into the site using the components which were described above.
Convivial Profiler
Convivial Profiler, a lightweight personalisation engine developed by Morpht. Convivial Profiler is able to track behaviour based around user journeys, campaigns and intents and deliver promotional blocks aiding the user in the way around the site. You can see the promotions at the bottom of each page.
Why GovFlix?
Why build GovFlix? The real reason was that we were really excited to see all of the possibilities which were available with Recombee. We believe that tools like this can be used to improve the user experience on sites. Government was chosen as the domain because this is an area which hitherto has not been a wide adoption of recommendation services. With the general acceptance and adoption of AI this is changing. We want to be able to bring these services to government agencies if they feel they are ready to take the next step.
Find out more
Morpht is experienced in building recommender websites in Drupal and GovCMS. We have a strong knowledge of the capabilities of Recombee and are able to bring that to life using modules and components we have developed.
For Government clients in Australia there is an easy path to procurement through the GovCMS DXP Panel where Morpht is able to provide the Recombee service as a Category 3 service. Please contact Morpht or GovCMS for more information.
