Does content need to be stored in a Web Project?

[goldpelican]

I'm looking at developing a prototype portal site that will use Alfresco WCM as the back end repository, interacting using Web Scripts to provide CRUD services against the WCM repository. My question is, having only played with WCM up until now following the "Alfresco WCM 2.1 Product Evaluation Guide", does web content have to be stored into a web project? Where is the best place to store content when interacting with the repository purely in a programmatic fashion?

thanks!

[goldpelican]

Bump? Anyone?

[steventux]

If you are only retrieving content via Web Scripts then I'd say it's not necessary to use WCM to store content in a Web Project.
You might find the WCM XForms content type creation and workflow suits your needs better, the only way to find out is to try ECM vs WCM content creation.
I'd say the WCM parts of Alfresco aren't totally mature having used the SVN build and Labs 3.0b release for a month or so. There are some annoying bugs to work around. I couldn't speak for the ECM side of things.

[goldpelican]

Thanks - to clarify, does this mean that the WCM XForms can only be used to create web content within a Web Project, not outside of a Web Project?

[steventux]

I'm not 100% on this but I believe so.
This PDF http://ecmarchitect.com/images/articles/alfresco-content/content-article.pdf explains the ECM content type creation steps.
Here's an overview of WCM http://www.packtpub.com/article/alfresco-web-content-management-2-0-part1

[tommorris]

A website can use web-scripts to query data in either the DM (ADM) repository or the WCM (AVM) repository. The choice is yours.

That website may be a static unmanaged website, or it  may have been managed and deployed using Alfresco WCM, in which case your website is stored inside the AVM (as a bunch of website assets such as HTML, JSP, CSS, JS, PNGs etc).

A WCM managed web-app may decide to query a database at run-time, but that doesn't mean you would necessarily manage that database content using the WCM too. In fact normally you wouldn't. In a similar sense, your website may treat the DM as a queryable content service, but you may not want that queryable content to be managed and deployed using the WCM features.

Your webscripts can modify content nodes in either the ADM or the AVM, but updates to objects within the ADM is often preferred. The ADM has a richer content-model (with types, associations, aspects, behaviours, rules etc).

If you do decide to deploy the AVM to another remote Alfresco instance, as part of the publishing process (the 'ASR' approach: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/ASR), then updates to the remote AVM content nodes through webscripts may be lost after the next deployment from staging.

If you're keen on using the WCM Web-Form/XSD approach for XML content creation, then this used to be available to content kept in the AVM only, but I understand that it is now available to the ADM too (version 2.9 and upwards). I haven't tried this myself yet, but you can read about it here http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/ECM_Forms and here http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Forms_Developer_Guide#ECM_Forms and here http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Forms

Tom