People have been using Alfresco to manage web content since the early days of the product. When using that approach, however, content authoring and deployment are completely customized. In 2007, Alfresco released its formal web content management functionality that added features most people expect when they think of a Web Content Management (WCM) offering, including templating, site preview, snapshots, virtualization, and deployment.

Although Alfresco's WCM offering is built on top of Alfresco's core repository, there are differences in the underlying stores and the underlying Alfresco features that are (and aren't) exposed to Alfresco WCM. This chapter is about those differences and also the specific customization points within WCM, but is not an exhaustive how-to on all capabilities of Alfresco's WCM offering. Specifically, in this chapter you'll learn how to: