Discovery Plugin

brxm-discovery connects Bloomreach Discovery to Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM). Discovery is Bloomreach's search and merchandising engine - it indexes your product catalog and powers keyword search, category browse, autosuggest, recommendation widgets, and visual (image-based) search. brXM is the content and page-composition layer: HST components render pages, editors manage content in Channel Manager, and the Page Model API feeds headless and SPA front ends.

This plugin is the integration between the two: a set of HST components, CMS editor extensions, and a server-side transport layer that call the Discovery API on your site's behalf, so no Discovery credentials are ever exposed to the browser.

What the plugin provides

• Search & browse - keyword search and category browse pages with server-built facets, pagination, sort, did-you-mean, and keyword-redirect handling.
• Autosuggest - a search bar component with a live typeahead dropdown (query, attribute, and product suggestions).
• Recommendations - four widget types (product-keyed, category-keyed, global/personalized, and keyword-keyed), each configurable by content editors without code changes.
• Visual search - shoppers can search by uploading a photo; the plugin proxies the upload so Discovery credentials stay server-side.
• Editorial curation - hand-picked product and category highlight components for merchandising slots that don't need to be algorithmic.
• CMS editor tooling - Open UI pickers and step-by-step wizards for selecting products, categories, and recommendation widgets, embedded directly in document editing.
• Analytics - a server-side pixel service that reports impressions, clicks, and page views back to Discovery for ranking and A/B testing, with consent-gating support.
• Headless-ready - every component exposes its data through the Page Model API in addition to Freemarker, so the same components can power a traditional site or a decoupled React/SPA front end.

Discovery itself is read-only from the plugin's perspective - your product catalog is synced into Discovery by your commerce platform's connector; this plugin only queries and displays what's already indexed.

Requirements

The plugin runs across brXM's two separate runtimes - the CMS webapp and the site webapp - each with its own artifact. See Installation.

Module overview

Where to go next