Optimizely user-generated content

  • Updated

The Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP) contains many features to support you in your daily work. Depending on how your solution is set up, some features described in this documentation may not be available to you. See Optimizely World for technical information.

Optimizely user-generated content (UGC) is a content discovery tool that can retrieve content from popular social sites (such as Facebook, Twitter, Google) and embed the content into your website.

Creating a UGC widget for Optimizely CMS

Optimizely UGC Widgets are designed for Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla FireFox, and Google Chrome. However, they are not designed to be used on Internet Explorer 10 or earlier.

  1. Click Optimizely UGC in the global menu. The UGC Admin page is embedded into your Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) site.

    Optimizely UGC is powered by Stackla, see their documentation for more information on how to use the user interface. You can perform the same actions as with the UGC Server page such as creating terms, managing filters, managing tags, creating widgets and so on. The Admin page informs you if you are missing any configuration properties in the Optimizely UGC Configuration page.

    Image: Optimizely UGC dashboard

    Optimizely UGC account authorization is valid for only 12 months at a time. If the following error appears - The access token is expired. Please go to the configuration page to re-authenticate. - go to the settings page and re-authenticate (log out then log in again).

  2. In the assets pane, select the Blocks tab and click Add. A new block name, Optimizely UGC Widget, appears among the available selections.

    Image: UGC widget

  3. Select the Optimizely UGC Widget block.
  4. Give the widget a name and select a property from the drop-down list.

    Image: UGC widget properties

    While creating a new Optimizely UGC block on a CMS site, the drop-down list displays data retrieved from UGC Server, which is cached every 5 minutes. If you create a new widget, it may not show for up to 5 minutes until the CMS site can get the latest widgets from the UGC server.

  5. Click Create.
  6. Publish the widget. The widget appears in the Blocks pane.

    Image: UGC widget block

  7. Go to the page where you want to display those widgets and drag and drop the block onto the page. The content appears.

    Image: UGC block widget on the page