There are many web content management systems available in the market today, either proprietary or open source. They help you to design a website, create web pages, link all media assets, edit the pages inline, and manage the look and feel of using templates. However, most of them use a single system for authoring and delivery, do not provide a validation process, do not secure the websites in more detail, cannot reuse the content effectively, and cannot integrate with external system to share the web content.
Alfresco provides a robust, easy to use, and scalable web content framework for managing multiple websites leveraging a common web infrastructure. Alfresco provides a publishing style web CMS, where you can create, preview, and approve the content on staging instance and then deploy the websites to test and/or production environments. It allows the separation of content from the look and feel and thus provides multiple usage of the same content by many other applications.
Alfresco offers true Web Content Management (WCM) by providing an open source alternative to expensive proprietary systems such as Microsoft SharePoint, Interwoven, and IBM Content Manager. Alfresco WCM is a good fit for the customers who are also looking for cost savings.
This book will guide you through creating, managing, and publishing web content in staging, test, and production environments. It will help you set up an infrastructure for supporting multiple websites using Alfresco, enabling a shortened web development cycle and providing a high return on investment, despite a low cost of ownership.
This book takes a step-by-step approach for building a complete web content management system using Alfresco. A greater emphasis is given to the concepts of web content creation and distribution. Plenty of sample code and screenshots are used in the book to make you confident in applying these concepts in real production scenarios.
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Written in an easy-to-read and encouraged-to-try style, this book will take you from the basics of publishing style CMS—such as web forms, page templates, and staging—to the skills that will make you an Alfresco developer, covering advanced topics such as workflow, web services integration, and more.
The topics that this book covers are:
Chapter 1, A Publishing Style Web CMS, explains the Alfresco's Web Content Management architecture and key features of the software.
Chapter 2, Installation and Configuration, includes tips to choose the right installation for you, and also installation of the software and start using it.
Chapter 3, Getting Started with Alfresco WCM, introduces the basic concepts of Alfresco Web Content Management from a user perspective. It demonstrates how to set up and configure Alfresco Explorer for managing a web project and showcases a sample web publishing scenario.
Chapter 4, Web Content Production with Web Forms, includes advanced concepts of separating the web content from presentation. You do this by storing the web content in XML using Alfresco web forms and presenting its various formats such as HTML and text using Presentation Templates.
Chapter 5, WCM Workflows, explains the entire process of creating web content, getting it approved, and publishing it to a staging environment. You will learn and have extensive hands-on experience with the examples to create a flexible workflow.
Chapter 6, Dynamic Deployment and Customizations, explains the dynamic customization of workflow without requiring a restart of the Alfresco server.
Chapter 7, Content Delivery and Deployment, introduces you to the content delivery and deployment features of Alfresco. You will understand the concepts behind delivering static content as well as dynamic content to the external production servers.
Chapter 8, Managing Multiple Websites Using WCM, covers information about managing multiple web projects using one installation of Alfresco WCM.
Chapter 9, Alfresco Surf and Web Editor, introduces Surf, which is an application framework for developing and delivering dynamic websites. Alfresco web editor is an application developed using Surf and provides in-context editing capabilities for Alfresco repository content.
Chapter 10, Integrating WCM Using Web Scripts, teaches you the web scripts and the integration of Alfresco WCM with the external systems using web scripts.
Chapter 11, Leveraging Alfresco Framework for WCM, provides information to leverage Alfresco's Document Management features in WCM.
Chapter 12, WCM Administration, provides a high-level overview of administering and maintaining your Alfresco implementation.