EVN has designed another proprietary Drupal Module, the MarkLogic Experience Module for Drupal (“MLE4D”), that works directly with MarkLogic Server for release 1Q 2012. This module provides the Experience capability found in EVN’s User Experience Model to facilitate the “Look-inside” type capability within Drupal to facilitate content sales.
The preview content capability is extended to enable publisher control of which portions of a content object (a single, sell-able piece of content such as a book, article, etc) may be read prior to purchase.
To facilitate this capability, MLEM4D must add additional metadata to each piece of content that describes how that content may be accessed. There are three states each portion of the content must have:
- Free Vend: Available for unlimited free viewing by any user, typically the front and back matter of a book (e.g. Table of Contents, Index, etc) or abstract for an article.
- Embargoed: Never available for viewing prior to purchase (e.g. last three chapters of a trade fiction book).
- Controlled Vend: Available for discovery to a percentage of the content (most of the body of a book)
The Controlled Vend state gives the most flexibility for Experience. This is usually set to some small percentage (perhaps 10%) of the document outside the Free Vend and Embargoed content so each user has an individually customized (via Discovery) experience to drive to a Purchase Decision.
During operation, this module is responsible for tracking a User’s usage of Controlled Vend. This is layered metadata for registered/authenticated users of the system. For unregistered users, this is accomplished via IP address.
The module provides the tools to manage the experience rights and permissions of one or more Content Objects for both paginated (PDF) and reflow (website, ePub, etc) content types as follows:
- Controlled Vend percentage rules based by:
- Site
- Content type (e.g. book, journal, etc.)
- Author
- Taxonomy category
- Free Vend percentage rules based by
- Same set of drivers as Controlled Vend, plus
- Percentage of front of Content Object
- Percentage of back of Content Object
- Embargo percentage rules based on same function set as Free vend
