Creating Websites with WCM from scratch

[lemmy]

Hi,

I'm a newbie to Alfresco. I want to create a website with WCM. So far I've installed Alfresco 3.3 and worked through the example "alfresco-wcm-examples-3.3". I've learned who to create web-projects, import already existing sites and add web-forms and rendition template.

But I'm totally struggled with the navigation. Where / how can I edit it? What is also missing in my understanding the part between creating an Alfresco web-project and seeing the first site without importing the content from an existing example. So what needs to be done to create a new website from scratch?

Your help is highly appreciated.

Regards,
Lemmy

[bremmington]

You have a couple of options with Alfresco WCM. One option is to use what we refer to as the AVM (advanced versioning model) repository. This is a little like Subversion (a file versioning system) with the added capabilities of authoring XML content, rendering that content through Freemarker and XSLT, and deploying the files to remote servers. Building the site itself using this option requires development - for instance you would build your navigation mechanism yourself.

The second option is to build out a website using the Web Quick Start. You can read about this on the wiki and there are also some blog posts from Ben Hagan on it. Go to the Alfresco Blog page and click on "Ben Hagan" on the right hand side. We also held a webinar on the Web Quick Start a couple of days ago, and you can view the recording of it.

Hope this is helpful.

[martin_c]

Hi guys.

Regarding the second option (using Web Quick Start), the available documentation and the webinar show how to modify the existing WQS site. Is there any way to create a similar site from scratch? Is there any documentation available?

Thanks in advance!

[bremmington]

The simplest way to start a new site is to import an existing one, delete the parts you don't want, and create any new bits that you do. At the most extreme this would be a case of deleting everything below "Alfresco Quick Start/Quick Start Editorial/root/" apart from "collections" and "index.html" and then building up your own section structure. For documentation about how to develop a WQS-based webapp, the WQS Developer Guide should help. If it doesn't then please come back to me, and let me know what you feel is missing so I can address it.

I agree that the "create from scratch" option should be slicker - perhaps we should simply ship an empty example along with the finance and government ones.