In my company we are evaluating a couple of java-based open source content management systems for use in a company intranet portal application. Currently a costly commercial solution is used as the CMS, and we are looking for an open source alternative.
In short our use case: the content managemnt system acts as a backend tool for content management purposes only, and a custom made front-end is developed for the content delivery using Weblogic portal framework. CMS is used by content creators to manage the dynamic content of the portal and to upload attachement files that are downloadable through the portal. The content created through the CMS is stored in current set-up in the CMS database and upon publishing it is pushed to a published schema in the database. When published, the static files are moved to the front-end web server. The content is retrieved by the portal application through content management system API to generate the pages.
I have been investigating the Alfresco documentation for some time to find out how Alfresco could be used for our purposes. I'm a bit confused with the ECM and WCM concepts, and which of them would actually be more suitable for our purposes. E.g. in Alfresco WCM there are no content types, but only these web forms through which content is created. Also in WCM all content is stored in files, rather than content items.
Here are some of the our key requirements for the CMS in addition to the ones presented above:
- Support the creation custom content types to provide simple content input forms for content creation
- Support the creation of meta-data content types; i.e. we want to make certain meta-data lists (e.g. languages, colours, etc.) referenced by the main content types to be maintainable through the CMS
- Multi-category publishing; it should possible for a single piece of content to reside in multiple places on the site. I.e. when publishing the content, it should be possible to place the content on multiple places on the site navigation without having multiple copies of the content item.
- Ability to create custom workflows
- Creation of custom content entry controls (i.e. widgets) on the content input forms
- Ability to add custom buttons and other controls to the content management tool user interface
I would grateful for any help or opinions about Alfresco's suitability in our scenario and whether I should actually be using the WCM extension of Alfresco or not.
Thank you.
houston
