Content Recommendations — Slider, Row or List shows recommended articles as cards. Choose one of four layouts: a horizontal rail the visitor scrolls with arrows, a plain card row that wraps, a stacked list, or a compact strip. Each card can carry an image, category, title, author, date, excerpt, rating, live read counts, and a Read more link. It reads from your content catalog, so once your columns are mapped every card fills itself in.
When to use it
- Related reading at the end of an article, to keep the visit going.
- Editor’s picks or trending on a homepage or section page.
- Personalized reading for a returning visitor, based on what they have read before.
Add it to an action
Create an action, open the template picker and choose Content Recommendations — Slider, Row or List. Work down the sidebar in order: pick a Layout, map your Catalog Fields, then style it. Controls that do not apply to your choices hide themselves — the Slider section disappears entirely if you pick another layout, for example.
Settings
Layout & Size
- Layout — slider is a horizontal rail with arrows (the default). horizontal is a plain card row that wraps. vertical is a stacked list. compact is a mini strip with small thumbnails.
- Maximum Width — caps how wide the widget gets and centres it. Use 100% to fill the container, or a fixed value such as 1200px.
- Text Direction — left to right, or right to left for Arabic, Hebrew and similar. Flips the cards, the rail and the arrows.
Slider
Only shown when the slider layout is selected.
- Items Visible — how many cards fit across on desktop, tablet and mobile. Decimals work: 4.5 shows half of the next card as a swipe hint, which tells the visitor there is more to scroll.
- Arrow Position — inside places the arrows over the edge of the cards; outside reserves room beside them. Either way the arrows stay within the widget, so they cannot be clipped by the surrounding page.
- Image Height, Space Between Cards, Minimum Card Width — the shape of each card and the gap between them.
The slider scrolls through every article it receives, so the Max Items limit and the Show More link do not apply to it.
Catalog Fields
Map these once per site: article title, URL, image, author, description, category and rating value. If a title, image or byline looks wrong or empty, this is the first place to check — a field that is not mapped renders as nothing.
Style
- Colour Preset — light, gold, bold or ocean. Recolours cards, badges, links and accents together. Gold is a dark theme and gives the widget a dark surface to sit on.
- Text Font — system, serif, rounded or condensed.
- Loading Skeleton and Smooth Reveal — a shimmering placeholder while the recommendations load, and a short pause before fading in so the widget does not jump around as the page settles.
Article Cards
- Card Info Order — standard shows category, then title, then author and date. title-first leads with the title. meta-top puts author and date above the title.
- Each part — category, title, author and date, description, rating, Read more — has its own toggle, and its style control appears only when that part is switched on.
How Many, Badges and Social Proof
- How Many — limit by a number of items or a number of rows, with an optional Show More link. Not used by the slider.
- New Badge — a rolling window in days. Set 7 and it always means the last seven days; it never becomes a fixed date.
- Popular Badge — marks articles in the top N per cent most read, over today or the past week.
- Social Proof Text — a live read count under each article, with a minimum so a low number never undercuts the article.
When There Is Nothing to Show
If the catalog returns no articles for a visitor, the widget shows a short message instead of an empty frame. Turn the message off to render nothing at all. In the editor you see sample articles here instead, so you can keep designing against a full layout.
Tips
- Match Items Visible to where the widget sits. Four across suits a full-width page; in a sidebar or a narrow column use two, or one with a decimal such as 1.2 so the next card peeks in.
- Badges and read counts come from Personyze site statistics. They can look empty in the editor and fill in on the live site once traffic accumulates.
- Use the rolling New badge rather than a date. It keeps working without anyone editing the action later.
- Check the live page, not just the preview. The preview substitutes demo data, so an unmapped catalog column can look fine there and render empty in production.
Related
See the content catalog and feed documentation for how articles get into Personyze, and your action’s Location and Display Frequency settings for where and how often the widget appears.