Content sources

A content source represents the connection between your CMS project and Ninetailed. Ninetailed syncs your audiences and experiences so that the Ninetailed Experience API knows what Audiences and Experiences to assign to a profile.

Ninetailed environments

Your Ninetailed account comes with two environments: a main and a development environment. The dropdown in the top left of the dashboard at app.ninetailed.io indicates what Ninetailed environment you are currently viewing. Profiles, Audiences, and Experiences from content source connections are specific to each environment.

When creating a Ninetailed instance in your code base, make sure that the environment property you supply matches the Ninetailed environment you created.

Create a new connection

To create a new connection:

1. Log in to the Ninetailed app.
2. Navigate to the "Content Sources" page.
3. Click Set up your first connection.
   NOTE : If this is not your first CMS connection, you can create a new connection by selecting New Content Source.
4. Select your Content Source.

The next steps vary depending on which content source you are connecting to.

For Contentful:

1. Authorize the connection with your CMS. If you are not already logged into your CMS, you will be prompted to do so at this time.
2. After the authorization is complete, the list of environments to which your current Contentful account belongs is displayed. Choose the environment where you want to install Ninetailed.
3. When prompted to create the connection, you may optionally toggle off installing Merge Tags if you need to be conscientious about the number of content types you are using within your Contentful environment. Merge Tags are a content type that allows you to dynamically insert profile attributes into content.
4. Provide a name and (optionally) a description for the connection.
5. Click Create Content Source. This extends the content model of the selected project by adding three content types: Ninetailed Audience, Ninetailed Experience, and Ninetailed Merge Tag (unless toggled off when creating a Contentful connection).

Connect to an alias

Ninetailed allows you to connect to an environment alias. Contentful encourages using environment aliases to make it easier to publish and roll back your configurations and content.

To connect an environment alias with Ninetailed, click Set up an Alias Content Source on your "Content Sources" tab.

If your CMS is currently not supported, let us know by filling in our survey or getting in contact with us on how to use our API for non-CMS content.

Add Experiences to content types

Next, extend your content model to support Personalizations and Experiments. While the Ninetailed content types are similar across the content management systems that Ninetailed connects to, the steps to extend a content model in each CMS varies.

To add experiences to content types in Contentful:

After creating your content source, the Personalized content types page is diplayed.

Select the content types to which you want to add Personalizations and Experiments. This will extend your content model to include a one-to-many reference field on those content types entitled "Ninetailed" (field name nt_experiences) that will reference entries of type "Ninetailed Experience".

Next steps

You can now create Audiences and Experiences in your connected Content Source. To render them in your front-end, make sure you set up your delivery. We also recommend adding your customer data and configuring Ninetailed Insights to measure performance.