topic Re: WQS for Corporate Site in Alfresco Archive

WQS for Corporate Site

javadevuk — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 12:34:22 GMT

Hi,I'm impressed with the Web Quick Start demo, automated Navigation, online web editor, approval workflow etc. This is exactly what I'm after in a Java based CMS solution. However, I'm a little concerned due to (I.M.O) lack of clear documentation.Is this solution ideal for a corporate production en

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

bremmington — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:51:49 GMT

WQS is ideal as a corporate solution, but is designed as a coupled delivery system (where pages are rendered on request and cached as needed) rather than a decoupled delivery system (where all the pages are rendered ahead of time and shipped off to a web server for delivery).

We are currently undertaking a benchmarking exercise to provide indicative system sizing to support different loads, so I don't have numbers to share with you at the moment. Do you have an idea of how may page impressions per second you would have to support, how cacheable the pages are (how often would pages change), and what the average page weight would be?

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

javadevuk — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:18:16 GMT

Thanks for your reply….

We would like to support 10 impressions per second.
Content changes about twice a week.
Page weight is between 200 - 600 KB.

But so far, for stability, server load, no vendor-lock-in reasons, a decoupled delivery system is highly favoured, similar to what Alfreso currently provides with WCM and FSR.

If I want to add/replace templates, how would I achieve this with WQS?
Do I have to create and build my own wcmqs.war?

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

bremmington — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:54:20 GMT

OK, that doesn't sound like a particularly heavy load and the churn is low. I guess that a good proportion of the heavier pages is likely to be binaries that aren't rendered through a template anyway. Is that right?

Alfresco provides you with two options for your WCM solution. Web Quick Start is currently targeted at a coupled delivery mechanism, although it is likely to support a decoupled approach too at some point in the future. Alternatively, the AVM solution is targeted at a decoupled delivery mechanism. If you definitely want to go with a decoupled approach then I suggest that you look at the AVM.

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

javadevuk — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:02:44 GMT

The heavier weights include large javascript files and images.
The HTML page themselves averages between 15 - 30 KB, with a few going up to 120 KB.

We are still considering the WQS solution, it feels much more user-friendly and certainly ticks the right boxes. I have to demonstrate both WQS and AVM solution to the business first. It would be great if WQS can support decoupled delivery in the future.

However, I will have to present this demo using our existing corporate layout/templates, hence why I'm asking how I could achieve this in WQS.

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

bremmington — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 15:33:34 GMT

Ah, sorry - completely failed to answer that part!

The sample site delivered with WQS is built using Spring MVC with the Surf presentation framework. You don't have to use Surf (or, indeed, Spring MVC) if you would prefer to roll your own app. The WQS API is delivered as a separate JAR file if you want to use it differently.

To explain a little more about the sample app, however, in case you want to start there, it is, as you say, packaged as a standard JEE WAR file. Inside this file, below the WEB-INF folder, are the folders that contain the Surf presentation elements: templates, components, and pages. These can seem a little daunting to start with, but are actually quite simple.

A "template" is often a Freemarker template that normally comprises HTML with holes in it. These holes are called regions and are uniquely named in the template. A snippet of a template from the WQS app is:


  <@region id="bellyband" scope="page"/>
  <div id="left">
    <@region id="left1" scope="page"/>    
    <@region id="left2" scope="page"/>    
    <@region id="left3" scope="page"/>
    
    <div class="h-box-1">
        <@region id="bottom-left" scope="page"/>    
    </div>

    <div class="h-box-2">
        <@region id="bottom-right" scope="page"/>    
    </div>
  </div>
  
  <div id="right">
    <@region id="right1" scope="page"/>   
    <@region id="right2" scope="page"/>   
    <@region id="right3" scope="page"/>   
  </div>
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There are nine named holes in that template ("bellyband", "left1", "left2", etc).

The regions (holes) are filled in with "components". These, oddly, are located in a folder named "webscripts" below the WEB-INF folder. Each component is like a little implementation of the MVC pattern - it optionally has a Controller (normally a little piece of javascript that is run on the server) that builds up a Model as an associative array (map) which is then rendered by a View which is often implemented using Freemarker. An example of a component from the sample site that has a little controller as well as a view is the slideshow that is shown on the home page. Its controller is a single line:


model.articles = collectionService.getCollection(context.properties.section.id, args.collection);
‍‍‍

and its view is a piece of Freemarker that iterates over the articles found by the controller:


<#if (articles.assets?size > 0)>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="${url.context}/js/slideswitch.js"></script>
    <div id="slideshow-wrapper">
        <ul id="slideshow">
            <#list articles.assets as article>
                <li <#if article_index == 1>class="active"</#if>>                     
                    <#if article.relatedAssets['ws:primaryImage']??>             
                        <#assign image=article.relatedAssets['ws:primaryImage'][0]>             
                        <a href="<@makeurl asset=article/>"><img src="<@makeurl asset=image rendition='featuredNewsThumbnail'/>" alt="${image.title!image.name}" class="slide-1-img" /></a>
                    </#if>
                    <div class="slide-1-desc">
                      <h1>${article.title!article.name}</h1>
                      <p>${article.description!''}</p>
                      <div class="slideshow-rm"><a href="<@makeurl asset=article/>">${msg('read.more')}</a></div>
                    </div>
                </li>
            </#list>
        </ul>
    </div>
</#if> 
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The last concept to describe are the "pages". A Surf page is basically a populated instance of a Surf template - that is to say that a page points at a template and defines which component should be placed in each of its regions. In the WQS system, when you set up "template mappings" on a section you are actually naming Surf pages rather than Surf templates. Sorry if that's confusing, but Surf pages are actually more like templates in most presentation frameworks, and, as I mentioned before, WQS is not tied to Surf. So, to take the example of the homepage in the WQS sample site, this is a Surf page named "homepage". This page is described with an XML document:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<page> 
   <id>homepage</id>
   <description>page with 5 main configurable blocks, ideal for site home page</description>   
   <template-instance>five-block</template-instance>
   <authentication>none</authentication>
   <components>
      <component>
         <region-id>bellyband</region-id>
         <url>/carousel/slideshow</url>
         <properties>
             <collection>news.featured</collection>
        </properties>         
      </component>  
      <component>
         <region-id>left1</region-id>
         <url>/list/wide</url>
         <properties>
             <collection>news.top</collection>
        </properties>         
      </component>       
      <component>
         <region-id>right1</region-id>
         <url>/list/narrow</url>
         <properties>
             <collection>blogs.latest</collection>
        </properties>         
      </component>       
      <component>
         <region-id>bottom-left</region-id>
         <url>/list/links</url>
         <properties>
            <collection>featured.links</collection>
         </properties>         
      </component>       
      <component>
         <region-id>bottom-right</region-id>
         <url>/content/named</url>
         <properties>
            <asset>feature.html</asset>
         </properties>         
      </component>       
   </components>
</page>
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This page points at the template named "five-block" which happens to be the template that I showed a snippet from above. As you can see, this page maps different components into the regions defined by that template. For example, it maps the slideshow component into the "bellyband" region.

You may find that you can take the templates and some of the components that we've provided, wire them together differently with your own page definitions, and then adjust the CSS to do the rest. Without knowing what your target look is, it's hard to know how difficult that would be. Hopefully this has given you some ideas, anyway.

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

javadevuk — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:07:51 GMT

Thank you for your reply Brian I will make a start on this.

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

rptester — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:52:31 GMT

I was also looking into WQS for my corporate website, which is totally a static website with only HTML pages and related javascript files, images and documents hosted on a web server. I dont have the option to deploy any war files.Is it possible to use WQS for this purpose?

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

bremmington — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:03:27 GMT

No, for that you should use the Alfresco AVM ("Web Projects") functionality. That was designed specifically for static delivery.

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

rptester — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:37:09 GMT

Thanks for replying.

Does AVM provide similar functionalities like WQS like web templating, template mappings based on sections, defining sections and articles?

If yes, can you guide me to some documentation that provide information about it?

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

bremmington — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:33:28 GMT

It's quite a different beast, and it doesn't make any assumptions about your site structure at all. Content is authored in XML and templates are used to render the XML into HTML (or other format). A good place to start is the Alfresco documentation server. Look under "Getting Started tutorials" > "Managing Web Content Using the AVM".

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

rptester — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:29:44 GMT

Thanks for the reply.

So does this mean I cannot take advantage of Alfresco Web editor tool to modify the content on my static website? can I implement/include that tool with my webaite without hosting my live website through Tomcat? I really like that tool and would like to use it if I could.

Re: WQS for Corporate Site

ben — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:50:50 GMT

The Web Editor is not supported by the AVM so only content within the DM store can be managed with this tool.

Regards, Ben.