Page Flow

Introduction

Page Flow Module provides a generic way to define and manage states of pages through Page Flow Documents in Bloomreach CMS authoring application, and a flexible way to implement Page Flow Interactions in Bloomreach CMS delivery-tier application.

What does it mean by Page Flow Interactions?

It is an application interaction style that comprises multiple steps for users to navigate, view or fill in the forms to complete a business-meaningful action.

Suppose a visitor is coming from a link in a marketing campagin E-Mail message. The link can possibly lead the visitor to the landing page first. If the visitor feels okay with the landing page content, then the visitor might want to follow the next page link. The navigation might lead to multiple step pages such as selecting a product, entering visitor's information, and so on.

Page Flow Module provides a solution to manage and implement this kind of multi-step-pages user interactions very easily in Hipppo CMS.

Why Page Flow Module?

Why should Page Flow Module be introduced then? Can developers not use Enterprise Forms or something similar?.

If you asked this as well, that's really a good question!

You can use Enterprise Forms or something similar for that kind of multi-step interactions, but that's not multi-step-pages actually because that kind of multi-step interaction solutions are working in an HstComponent window level, not in multiple, totally-separated HST pages.

The multi-step interaction solution in an HstComponent window level has the following disadvantages:

• It is not possible to use a different HST page layout in a step page because the solution works in an HstComponent window level.
• It is not so flexible for developers to implement each step page because all the interactions must be configured or implemented in the specific multi-step interaction framework such as Enterprise Forms.
• Business users cannot configure different Relevance personalization on each step HST page separately (e.g, setting a different banner above the form in a step) because the solution resides only in single HstComponent window.
• Business users cannot configure a conversion goal in a specific step HST page (e.g, final application form page step) for an Experiment because the solution resides only in single HstComponent window.

Page Flow Module provides solutions for all those problems listed above.

Features

• Generic Page Flow Definitions as documents in Bloomreach CMS authoring application.
• Generic Page Flow Handling Runtime, which uses Spring Statemachine library under the hood.
• Generic HST SiteMap Item Handler for automatic Page Flow resolution and redirection.
• Generic ChannelInfo interface for easy creation of campaign channel.
• Generic JCR Observation Event Listener to refresh Page Flow definitions automatically.

Module Overview