While reading content on your favorite digital news or other informational platform, you'll likely see a batch of "related content" at the bottom of an article. This is a fairly recent trend in digital publications, with the intent of piquing your interest and keeping you engaged on their platform. Our Related Content widget aims to achieve the same goal.
NOTE: Only Higher Logic staff can add this widget to your site. If you already have it and want to remove it, we recommend hiding the widget instead of deleting it.
How it works
You're likely wondering how this widget populates related content. The technical answer is it uses TF-iDF (term frequency - inverted document frequency) methodology; the simple way to think of this is it's scanning content on your site for the most relevant terms/keywords to identify similar content.
EXAMPLE: As an example, let's say you have several communities dedicated to your organization's various products. You just posted a discussion about Product X. There are also three discussions and two blogs that talk about Product X, all of which use the term "Product X" throughout. Because of this, they will be deemed "related" by the TF-iDF scan and will appear in the widget.
What it looks like
This widget can be configured to show related content in either a block or list view. An example of each is shown below.
For each piece of related content the widget displays its title, author, how long ago the content was created, and the content type (discussion, event, blog, etc.). Click a title to view the content.
Block view
List view
Where this widget is located
On many Higher Logic sites, this widget is displayed, by default, when viewing specific:
- Blog articles
- Discussion posts
- Question posts
- Event Calendar items
- Event Manager events
- Idea submissions
NOTE: In the future, this widget will be available for Library Entries as well.
Widget configuration
Let's take a look at the various ways this widget can be configured:
NOTE: Only Higher Logic can configure this widget. If you'd like to make any changes to one of your Related Content widgets, create a case.
- Content types - This controls the content types that will display in the widget (e.g., discussions, blogs, etc.) You can use this to limit the content displayed to just discussion posts or just events, for example.
- Display Mode - You can display related content in one of two views: Block = square blocks in a horizontal row; List = Content presented in a vertical list format.
- ItemKey Parameter - This is captured from the URL where the widget is placed. It instructs the widget what content item to reference when pulling recommendations.
- Max Count - Maximum number of related content items to show (default is 5).
- Stay in Community? - Enable/disable this option to decide whether to only show content from within a community or pull content from across your entire site. If disabled, all content a user is eligible to see will appear.
- Tracking Code - Arbitrary code appended to URLs to identify efficacy of widgets by location.
How to hide this widget
This widget is available by default on many Higher Logic sites. As mentioned above, only Higher Logic staff can add this widget to your site, so if you already have it and want it removed, we recommend hiding the widget instead of deleting it. Let's learn how.
- Since this widget is located on the Home page, navigate to your site's Home page.
- In the Admin Toolbar, click (or right click for a new tab) Edit Page.
- You're now editing the page in Page Designer. Click the widget to select it, and then check the Hide box.
- Click Publish to apply the change and hide the widget.