Where Code and Content Meet: Design Patterns for Web Content Management and Delivery, Personalisation and User Participation

Chapter 4. Personalisation and User Participation

Until now this book has dealt with the management and the delivery of web content in general. It's now time to add more spice to the content we're dealing with. When you look at websites around the world, you will notice that there's an increasing demand to present personalised content – content that is tailored specifically to a user's or a user group's interests and preferences.

But it is not just personalisation that is becoming more and more important. In the Collaborative Web, many web platforms these days make user participation an integral part of their domain model. Wikipedia is perhaps the most prominent example (www.wikipedia.org); Amazon, with ratings and reviews provided by customers, is another (www.amazon.com). Many platforms allow users to contribute their own content and share it with others. Users can communicate with each other and rate content that others have contributed. They can tag content, allowing tag clouds or other folksonomies to evolve. Everybody can get involved, and the roles of users and editors seem to fuse.

In some respects, personalised and user-generated content isn't that different from traditional web content. The patterns from the previous chapters still apply, even in the presence of personalisation and user participation. But there are additional requirements and challenges that I'm going to address in this chapter:

Figure 4.1. Road map to the patterns

• How can you implement personalisation strategies? ...