Enable region identification in WebSphere Portal

Use geographic targeting tools to associate a URL pattern with a specific region. However not all URL patterns are typically supported.

URL patterns that are not supported have the region or country information encoded as a string value in a parameter list, such as...

www.xyzco.com/products/information/?article=ABC123?country=UK

The following options are supported:

• Subdomains with generic domains, such as de.xyzco.com

• Subdirectories with generic domains, for example www.xyzco.com/es/...

We configure top-level domain names with country codes and subdomains with generic domain using standard portal configuration steps. However, when we write the region information into the relative path of a Portal URL, we need to adapt the portal site structure to differentiate between pages and page groups for a specific country. If we use WCM to deliver the content into the portal, this has implications as to how the content is managed and organized in the library or libraries. In both cases, the portal capabilities of rendering user friendly URLs is important. We have two options to handle this situation. They are described in the following.

• The first option is based on the assumption the site is split up at a certain point to reflect the different regions or countries. A typical scenario can be either an online shop or a product overview specific to the countries in which a company operates. Example URLs might then look as follows:

  • For the US: http://www.xyz-co.com/home/products/us/

  • For France: http://www.xyz-co.com/home/products/fr/

  • For Italy: http://www.xyz-co.com/home/products/it/

  To achieve this, set the friendly name of the top-level page that serves as the entry page for a specific country, with the appropriate country code as the identifier that is then published by means of the URL. Note that we need to assign friendly names in the whole hierarchy of all pages that can be identified as a page for a certain region. The previous example would result in two main unique portal pages:

  • home
  • products This has three region specifics pages: us, fr, and it.

• The second option has the same first two levels in its page hierarchy as the first: home and products . The products page renders the content based on user selection or preference. Then Web Content Manager delivers the content for the chosen country. The association of a web page with a set of content items in the WCM library is done using site areas. The names of the site areas represent the country codes. Three portal "content" pages are added to the products page associated with the site areas. In the example, this adds three region-specific portal pages associated with the site areas us, fr, and it.

Parent Region support and multi-regional sites

Related concepts:
About friendly URLs for web content
Use friendly URLs