Quick Guide?

[drozes]

Hi guys;

Over the past month I've been slowly picking up Alfresco - evaluating weather it is an option my company can benefit from.  I'm not on the QuickStart section.

I've successfully deploy the wcmqs sample with no issues.  I've been able to add new content, configure the navigation and update CSS.

*************************

What I need to do is mimic the way QuickStart deploys, how it deploy it's own virtual site.  I would need to be able to have the same workflows as quickstart - in regards to how the navigation and files are produced.  I need the share/alfresco tier utilities of QuickStart - but need to customize the presentation tier.

What I need to able to do is have my own custom template files and folder structure.  From the quick start dashlet you can pick a package to import - I am guessing I would need to make my own package with my own templates/js/css/webscripts in them?


Also - Is using quickstart a better choice for this over making my own presets and having it built into the 'create site' feature.

Any direction, instructions(on how to make my own package) or links is greatly appreciated.

[jpotts]

In QuickStart, the repository contains only content data. So you can create an ACP of content if you want, and then you could use it to load the content into any Alfresco repository, but your presentation tier assets that make the site work do not go in the repository. Those are part of the web application.

The web application, the thing that makes up the presentation tier of a Web Quick Start based web site, lives in a WAR file called wcmqs.war. If you want to make changes to the presentation tier, that's the web app you want to modify. The web application is built using Surf and the Web Quick Start API. So any resources you can find on Surf will be helpful to you as you modify the site.

You might be interested in something called DeckShare. It is a very light customization of the out-of-the-box Web Quick Start application. This blog post walks you through what we did at a high level.

If you need to move beyond that, you might take a look at the Surf Code Camp material. It is quite dated–in fact it pre-dates Web Quick Start significantly–but it might help you find your way around the Surf framework.

Hope that helps,

Jeff