Simple CMS, 'overkill'?

[leon_chop]

I use DITA Open Toolkit for generating xhtml content (short HOWTO documents).
I wonder if it would be suitable to use Alfresco to create "simple CMS" with main functionality to list and browse through the xhtml static content (initially strip away much of default functionality). Furthermore, an important functionality would be search in metadata (contained in xhtml code).

I want to start with only this functionality, but I would increase functionality gradually.

Grateful for advice.
regards
Leon

[jpotts]

Sorry that no one got to this until now. You could definitely use Alfresco to manage XHTML static content. Alfresco full-text indexes content so you can use it to search those files. However, it does not infer semantic meaning from the XML. So, for example, if you have a tag called "customer" then any search that searches on a keyword of "customer" would return that document as a hit. Some people work through this problem by extracting XML values into properties on the objects which they can then search against.

You might also look at what <a href="http://www.componize.com/">Componize</a> has done. I believe they have a DITA solution that sits on top of Alfresco.

Jeff