Simple Collaborative Filter

Simple Collaborative Filter is an easy way for sites to curate content using collaborative filtering. "Collaborative filtering" is basically creating content recommendations based on a "users who viewed this node also viewed..." approach. This module provides a "simple" way to do this that doesn't make site owners install any heavy dependencies to compute the recommendation algorithm. It works straight out of the box.

The second thing this module does is make content recommendations even before a new piece of content has been viewed. It does this by looking at similar taxonomy terms and content popularity. Collaborative filtering for content-driven sites - e.g., blogs and news outlets - faces a "user zero" problem: until a new piece of content has been viewed by tens of users who also view other pages, there is no content to recommend.

Simple Collaborative Filter provides a Views view that uses a custom contextual filter handler to add extra fields onto each result, which are then used to sort content in a configurable order. Site owners can use this to make content recommendations by configuring the options and the sort order as they see fit.

This module is ideal for curating content for infinite scroll, or for a "Users who viewed this node also viewed" recommendation block.

This article explains the approach and thinking behind this module.

See the INSTALL.txt file for a more detailed technical explanation.

Similar modules

• Browsing History Recommender

- uses the Recommender API's algorithms to prepare recommendations based on browsing history.

Dependencies

• Focused History module
• Taxonomy module
• Views module

7.x-1.x relies on the Focused History module, which allows a site to store content-viewing history in a more configurable manner than the normal `history` and `accesslog` tables.