Tagalys installation and setup on Magento 2

Sign up for a Tagalys account

Copy your API credentials

For Your Server Setup, choose Staging for your test server and Production for your live installation. You should use separate Tagalys accounts (that have different API keys) to maintain different configuration and product catalogs. Staging accounts are not billed.
For platform, select Magento 2.1+.

In the next screen, you will see your API credentials as a JSON object. You will need this text to start the setup later. Click the Copy API credentials link to copy the credentials to your clipboard.

Technical Notes

Testing on localhost

If you want to test on a local developer system that is not connected to the public Internet, you have to use a tunnel like ngrok and Magento should be configured for the new domain.

This is required because Tagalys syncs and updates statuses on your Magento installation using HTTP(s) requests.

Install via Composer

# base module for sync and category page merchandising
composer require tagalys/tagalys-magento2
php bin/magento module:enable Tagalys_Sync

# for front-end features like search
composer require tagalys/tagalys-magento2-frontend
php bin/magento module:enable Tagalys_Frontend

php bin/magento setup:upgrade

# depending on your Magento mode:
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Tagalys is installed using Composer. Run these commands commands from within your Magento root directory.

Depending on your Magento mode, you may have to run the setup:di:compile and setup:static-content:deploy commands - just follow the same steps you do to install other extensions.

Setup

Tagalys Menu in Magento Admin

Now that Tagalys has been installed, you are ready to begin the setup process. Go to Magento Admin > System > Tagalys > Configuration.

API credentials

Paste your API credentails

Paste your API credentials (available in your Tagalys Dashboard after signing up) in the API credentials field and click Save API credentials. This will verify your Tagalys account and take you to the next step.

Parent Category Assignment

Automated missing parent category assignment during sync

Tagalys requires products to be assigned to all parent categories of the sub categories they are assigned to. This is necessary to position products precisely in parent categories in Magento.

For example, if a product is assigned to "Men > Tops > Hoodies & Sweatshirts", it should also be assigned to the parent categories "Men" and "Men > Tops":

Sync Settings

Settings for syncing products

In this step, choose the stores for which you want to enable Tagalys features. Each Store View is listed separately and will be saved as a separate bucket in Tagalys. This allows for features like multiple languages or catalogs and default currencies to work correctly and makes it possible to apply more relevant Analytics metrics.

We recommend that you leave Periodic full sync on to make sure that any updates missed in the normal Sync process (due to, for example, network issues) are fixed automatically. The frequency for this is defined by your Cron file.

Detecting custom product updates

Tagalys automatically detects product updates made from the Magento Admin interface via the Catalog/Products, Catalog/Categories and Data Transfer/Import sections. If you are using third-party / custom code that doesn't dispatch the standard Magento hooks, there are two options to notify Tagalys of updates:

Trigger an event

$productDetailsObj = new \Magento\Framework\DataObject(array('product_ids' => array(1,2,3,4,5,6)));
$eventManager = $this->_objectManager->get('\Magento\Framework\Event\Manager');
$eventManager->dispatch('tagalys_record_updated_products', ['tgls_data' => $productDetailsObj]);

You can trigger the tagalys_record_updated_products event like this to notify us of updates. This can be done in batches.

Enable updated_at tracking

If your code / module updates the updated_at column of the catalog_product_entity table, Tagalys can monitor it to detect changes. You can enable this from the Products Sync section of the Support & Troubleshooting tab under Magento Admin > Setup > Tagalys > Configuration

Image Settings

To reliably display product images in the Tagalys Dashboard and in any front-end features like Recommendations or Search, Tagalys generates and maintains its own product thumbnails in the media/tagalys folder. Please adjust the image quality settings as required.

Once you've reviewed and chosen all the options, click Save & Continue to Sync.

Cron

Crontab - Replace `path_to_magento_root` with the correct path

*/5 * * * * php -f /path_to_magento_root/bin/magento tagalys:sync --max_categories 50
*/5 * * * * php -f /path_to_magento_root/bin/magento tagalys:update_product_positions
0 2 * * * php -f /path_to_magento_root/bin/magento tagalys:run_maintenance
0 * * * * php -f /path_to_magento_root/bin/magento tagalys:update_popular_searches

For earlier versions, replace the respective commands with the following:

Plugin version <= 2.2.8
*/5 * * * * php -f /path_to_magento_root/bin/magento tagalys:update_product_positions --max_categories 50

Plugin version <= 2.2.5
*/5 * * * * php -f /path_to_magento_root/bin/magento tagalys:sync --max_products 500 --max_categories 50
*/5 * * * * php -f /path_to_magento_root/bin/magento tagalys:update_product_positions --max_categories 50

For Tagalys to keep products and categories in sync, some background processes have to be setup. These have been defined as various Console Commands and should be triggered via your crontab as per these recommended frequencies.

The user running these Commands should have write access to the media folder.

Command	Recommended frequency	Description
`sync`	`/5 * * *` (every 5 minutes)	Syncs products and categories enabled for merchandising by Tagalys. At every run, it writes a configurable number of products to a sync file and syncs a configurable number of newly added / selected categories to Tagalys. If there is nothing to update, it quits immediately. Earlier versions: `--max_products` - If your products have a large number of attributes and writing 500 products takes longer than 4 minutes, then reduce this number.
`update_product_positions`	`/5 * * *` (every 5 minutes)	Updates product positions in categories (and cleares relevant caches) if required
`run_maintenance`	`0 2 * * ` (once a day at a low traffic time)	Triggers a full resync of products and retries syncing categories that have not been synced. * Should be scheduled after Catalog Price Rules are applied and reindexing is finished.
`update_popular_searches`	`0 * * * *` (every hour)	Requires Tagalys_Frontend: Update pinned and popular search suggestions.

Sync

Sync Status

After you save the sync settings, you will be taken to the Sync tab where you can see the status of the syncing process.

If you have setup the background processes to run automatically, as per the previous step, the Feed Status entry will automatically increase from 0% to 100% in batches every five minutes. After this the status will change to Waiting for Tagalys during which time Tagalys processes your products. Once our servers finish processing, the status will automatically change to Finished.

You will receive an email when this is done, so you don't have to wait till you see 100%. Just make sure that the percentage starts increasing. If it doesn't please check your cron settings or contact us.

Category Pages

Settings for Category Pages

Once setup is complete, you will see a new tab for Category Pages Magento Admin > System > Tagalys > Configuration. If you do not see this, refresh the page. If Setup Complete says No, then check your sync status or contact us.

After choosing to enable the feature, read through the Technical Considerations section carefully - there are options to configure Tagalys correctly for multi store setups with same / different products and with ascending / descending order of the Category-Product-Position field. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Once you choose some categories and click Save Listing Page Settings, the background process will transfer the categories to the Tagalys Dashboard within 10 minutes and you can merchandise the pages by logging in to your Tagalys Dashboard. Any updates you make in the dashboard will transfer within 10 minutes to the front-end.

Setup checklist: This feature works by modifying Magento's Category-Product-Position field. To make sure it works as expected, please verify the following:

Your category pages are configured to be sorted by the Position field.
Your category pages sorting direction matches your choice in Magento Admin > System > Tagalys > Configuration > Listing Pages. This could be set in one of your blocks / view files, so please double-check.
If you have any custom / front-end caches enabled, you may have to listen to Tagalys events and clear cache as appropriate. Tagalys fires the event tagalys_category_positions_updated with the category IDs that were updated in the payload so you can do this. If you have any questions on this, please contact us.

$categoryIdObj = $observer->getData('tgls_data');

$categoryIds = $categoryIdObj->getCategoryIds();

Search

Settings for Search

Tagalys Search can be enabled from the Search tab in Magento Admin > System > Tagalys > Configuration. The configuration options are:

Search box selector: The jQuery selector of the search box on your front-end.
Align suggestions to search box parent: If you want to align the search suggestions popup under a parent of the search box instead of the search box itself, specify the selector here.

Recommendations

Tagalys Recommendations are loaded by reading data attributes on HTML tags. You place a line of HTML code with with your requirements where you want the recommendation widget to appear and Tagalys will load this content asynchronously.

In all these examples, data-tagalys-widget-opts-per-page should be a valid JSON string, where each key is a browser window size in pixels and value is number of visible product tiles at that size. You can use custom pixel sizes, but Tagalys internally sets the keys 300, 600, 900 and 1200 so you should also overwrite these if you want them to be different from the defaults mentioned below.