ATG Recommendations
Helper Plugin

For Firefox

The ATG Recommendations Helper Plugin is designed for website integrators and administrators who will benefit from a more accessible view of their ATG Recommendations implementation.

This plugin provides a real-time, straightforward display of what the ATG Recommendations API sees on your page and can even provide feedback about your implementation.

How to use the plugin

What is the plugin

After installing the plugin and restarting Firefox, you will see two things. The first is the small ATG Recommendations icon in the bottom right of your browser. This looks like a white box with the red letters CS in inside. At any time, clicking on this box once will disable the ATG Recommendations Helper Plugin display and put a black slash through the image. Clicking a second time will re-enable it.

The second thing you will notice is the blue box that appears on the page that says CleverSet Helper at the top. This is the main display of the helper plugin and is the only part of the page the plugin will alter.

What information is presented in the plugin

Navigating to a page on your site where you have implemented the ATG Recommendations API will show you details about that configuration. You will see a greenish box that contains the configuration from the main ATG Recommendations "cs-cfg" block. Each line represents a configuration option and its value. This will display what the ATG Recommendations API sees on your page.

Pages on your site without a ATG Recommendations implementation will still display the Helper Plugin. This is to make sure you know that there is no configuration on that page. The more pages on your site with ATG Recommendations tracking code, the better.

If you are displaying recommendations on the page, then another box will appear in the helper for each recommendation container on the page. If you have more than one container they will appear in different colored boxes.

What other capabilities does the plugin present

Clicking on the button labelled "Get Sample Recommendations" will do just what the name suggests. Recommendations will be requested as if though you had ATG Recommendations recommendations on that page, whether or not you really do. They will display to the left of the helper plugin, aligned vertically. Clicking on an item will take you to its detail page.

On a page that contains a configuration with a productId, another button will appear called "Get CleverSet Database Information." This will query the ATG Recommendations servers for more information about the product you are viewing. The data will be added to the helper plugin below the button. If nothing appears for several seconds after clicking the link, then it is likely that our database does not have any information about the product you are viewing.

Uncovering Problems

The ATG Recommendations helper plugin can give you help with some simple configuration problems on your pages. It is not as smart as the average web developer though. You should use it to help diagnose problems and to gain insight into how ATG Recommendations sees your pages. It's a handy tool, but won't solve all your problems.