Migrate to Alfresco

[venkatvj]

Hello There,

I am writing this post to find out the recommended way to migrate our website into Alfresco. Hopefully i get some good suggestions.

Let me start with explaining our current website. Its a simple j2ee based I18N website backed by oracle. Each webpage is divided into 3 areas; 1. Navigation (typical drop down type menus) 2. Main content 3. Related content.
The navigation is heirarchical in nature; the entire tree is stored in the db. The maincontent and related content are HTML snippets stored under apache doc-root. Each navigation node (in the hierarchy) has references to the maincontent and related content files.

A request (uniquely pointing to a node) is fullfiled by assembling the maincontent and related content. Thatz it.

Now the business requires a CMS system and everyone is almost convinced of Alresco. I am doing a PoC to move this web app into Alfresco.

Now i am usure whatz the best approach. Obviously, i think, the main content and related content files will be stored in Alfresco as a Web Project in a well defined structure. But i am unsure how to store the navigation tree.

I forgot to mention one thing, our site supports I18N; so one each could have multiple translations.

I truly appreciate any pointers.

Thanks
Venk

[rdanner]

Hello There,

I am writing this post to find out the recommended way to migrate our website into Alfresco. Hopefully i get some good suggestions.

Let me start with explaining our current website. Its a simple j2ee based I18N website backed by oracle. Each webpage is divided into 3 areas; 1. Navigation (typical drop down type menus) 2. Main content 3. Related content.
The navigation is heirarchical in nature; the entire tree is stored in the db. The maincontent and related content are HTML snippets stored under apache doc-root. Each navigation node (in the hierarchy) has references to the maincontent and related content files.

A request (uniquely pointing to a node) is fullfiled by assembling the maincontent and related content. Thatz it.

Now the business requires a CMS system and everyone is almost convinced of Alresco. I am doing a PoC to move this web app into Alfresco.

Now i am usure whatz the best approach. Obviously, i think, the main content and related content files will be stored in Alfresco as a Web Project in a well defined structure. But i am unsure how to store the navigation tree.

I forgot to mention one thing, our site supports I18N; so one each could have multiple translations.

I truly appreciate any pointers.

Thanks
Venk

One thing you could do is convert the navigation to an XML definition and then use the rendition service, webscripts or other mechanisms to render them in to some kind of menu, etc.  The XML schema you use can support the translations. I think where you keep the the translation depends on what you are trying to do, the volume of translations, and what your workflow is.  Have you looked at Alfresco's muli-lang capability?

Just a thought. Glad to hear you are considering Alfresco, I hope you participate often in the forums and keep us up to date on the ways you are using Alfresco.

[venkatvj]

Thanks for your suggestion Russ. I'll look into the multi lingual features from Alresco; haven't looked into it yet;

[kvc]

A quick note to add …

You can export your existing content from your DB as separate XML documents defined using some schema (which would be registered in the DD as a Web Form so that you have a form interface going forward for creating new items and modifying your exported assets).  When you export, you can output those XMLs according to any foldering structure you wish.  Your nav as Russ managed can be dumped out as a separate XML with its own form definition or can be read instead from the directory structure.  You can take your pick.  The benefit of having your nav read from an XML and modifiable via a form is that through the form you can choose which folders show up in your nav tree, in which order, and can have user-defined labels in multiple languages.

An example of using an XML for navigation defn can be found in our Website Sample Framework (WSF).  This will be updated in the next couple of months to show richer navigation options driven by Web Forms and Web Scripts.


Kevin

[venkatvj]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks a lot for taking a stab at this.  One good news, we will soon be a customer of alfresco. Just the last formalities are pending.

Anyways, coming to my PoC: I like your idea of transforming all my existing content types to a web form and that alfresco would dynamically create a Web UI to capture this content. I'll definitely want to go that approach. Can you please provide me some links in the KB related to this as i think we would be surely be having some requirements that requires customizing that interface?

Reg the navigation, in our case, as the storage and navigation structures would most likely be different I don't think we could retrieve the navigation from the folder structure.

The other option is to store it as an XML as Russ suggested. I have some doubts regarding that. Let me try to explain with an example. In our current system, a new webpage (uniquely identified by a URI lets say "/productsalfresco.html") gets into existence the user must provide the following info:
1. Parent node (/product/) - note the system will not automatically choose it based on the URI but the user will specify.
2. Locale
3. Main content URI
4. Related content URI

Note that by adding more pages the tree is also built simultaneously and with these info we could generate the webpage at any point in time.

With Alfresco, now holding the references to the main and related content and the navigation in an XML, i am not clear on how to manage the tree and generate the page. I understand there will be a form for maintaining the navigation. But i should have the capability to refer to the main, related content, and the parent node. I guess it points back on how the interface is generated and how to customize it.

Please lmk whether i am going in the right direction.


Thanks
Venkat