Local Connection

• Go to 'My Channels' section and click 'Add New' to create a new channel.
  
  

• Choose a connector type (required field) from the drop-down menu to match your CMS type and version.

  Further configuration will depend on the connector type you choose. You can find more information about configuration of the CMS specific connector in the Connectors page.

• 'Name' (required field) - type channel name. 
• 'URL' (required field) - enter base URL of your website.
• 'UTC Offset difference' (optional field) - you can set up a UTC offset difference between iLangL cloud and content data source.
• 'Enable content configuration from plugin' - mark it to give access to Content Channel Configuration from the plugin view.
• 'Enable change tracking' - mark it to activate 'Export changes only' functionality. By default this option is disabled and will not be available during the content export.
• 'Enable publishing' - mark it to enable 'Import and Publish' option for channel plugins.

• 'Internet connection'/'Local connection' (required field) - choose 'Local connection' button. 

  This article describes how to create and validate the Local connection. The article on Internet connection can be found here. 

• 'Service GUID' (required field) - enter local Content Provider of service GUID.
• Click 'Ping' button to make sure that connection works well. In case of success, system will display 'Successfully pinged' message.

• If it fails, please refer to troubleshooting guide. 

You have two options to specify local connection:

Option 1: Specify local connection in the cloud channel

• 'Server' - enter server IP address, domain name or path to the local storage (depends on the connector type you have chosen).
• 'Port'  - you can specify server connection port.
• 'Database' - enter the database name.
• 'Table Prefix' (optional for some CMSs) - enter the database table prefix.
• 'User Id' - enter the user name that will be used to connect to your site or database (depends on the CMS you have chosen).
• 'Password' - enter user's password.

Option 2: Use connection alias that was specified in the 'Content Provider' configuration file

• Check 'Connection alias' checkbox below the connection tab and enter your connection alias.

How to Validate Connection

• Click 'Check Connection' button.
• If validation passes successfully, next step will be choosing a portal in the 'Select Portal' field.

Benefits

Our team developed the Content Provider to overcome the multitude of challenges posed by internet connection to a remote content data sources. Here is a short list of challenges tackled by Content Provider:

• Reduced Complexity - When a remote connection is set up from the data source the process becomes complicated as users face firewall issues. They might need remote permissions, static IP required, and other permissions just to set up the connection.
  Content Provider largely reduces the complexities involved in the remote connection process by switching to local connection approach.

• Increased Speed - When the content increases in size working over an internet connection becomes cumbersome.
  Content Providers interacts with content data sources via a batch of small requests. Each request that is sent over the internet has only a small delay. For instance, a good ping time takes only about 30 milli seconds. When the amount of content and number of requests increases the impact Content Provider has on the system performance is visible. The Speed of import and export operation is increased tremendously. The performance in an intranet connection scenario is very high as the ping time is less than 1 millisecond.

• Improved Security - Security becomes an issue when access to the internal content data happens through an external connection.
  Our Content Provider offers improved security to your data as it can be hosted at customer environment behind the firewall. It enables interaction with content data source directly through the intranet environment.