Book Image

Alfresco 3 Web Content Management

Book Image

Alfresco 3 Web Content Management

Overview of this book

Alfresco provides a robust, easy to use, and scalable web content framework for managing multiple websites leveraging a common web infrastructure. If you are interested in configuring and building a new website quickly, determined to create a scalable infrastructure to stage multiple websites, and want to secure and control the content being pushed to external applications, then you have reached the right place.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 high return on investment and low cost of ownership.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. You will learn the various options used to install Alfresco including File System Deployment receivers on target production servers. You will also learn to configure a single instance of Alfresco to serve multiple web projects. Focus is given to reuse assets such as images, forms, and workflows across multiple web projects.It will introduce you to advanced concepts of separating the web content from presentation. The entire process of creating web content, getting it approved and published to a staging environment needs a robust workflow process. You will learn and have extensive hands-on experience with the examples given in the book to create a flexible workflow. You will learn about Alfresco Web Editor, a new feature released with the latest version of Alfresco 3.3. You will learn to configure Web Editor for in-context editing of web pages. You will be able to try out various integration options using Alfresco’s RESTful web services framework. By the end of the book, you will be able to set up an extensible enterprise web content management system for your company and customers.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Alfresco 3 Web Content Management
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface

Integrating WCM with external applications—case studies


In an earlier chapter on web forms, we talked about how we can use Alfresco WCM for content production. Now in this section, we will discuss some of the case studies where the actual application is outside of Alfresco, but the content will be stored in Alfresco WCM and needs to be served from Alfresco only. For that, we can use Alfresco web scripts, which will act as an integration point for Alfresco WCM content and the actual application.

Integrating Alfresco WCM and Liferay with a news portlet

Let's consider the case where we want to have a news portlet in some Liferay Portal Application. So here, rendering of the portlet will be handled in Liferay, but the actual news content and the headlines for the news are stored in Alfresco WCM.

We have some news content stored in the /ROOT/common/inc folder, and we will try to fetch the headlines for these news items.

Web script for getting news headlines

In this example, we will create a web...