WCM, Portals and Navigation

[deas0815]

Hallo everybody,

I am (still facing the requirement to build a alfresco wcm based JSR-168 portlet
application. The portal has not been chosen yet, but I know at least one portal
(Vignette VAP) which is aware of a (proprietary) navigation tree.

Now, I have tried out the wsf demo website which models the navigation as form based
content.

Now what is the suggested approach to deal which navigation ?

When you're forced to make a choice between the portals navigation and a wcm form
based one, which are the factors one should take into consideration ?

Especially if you have a portal which is aware of navigation (and which may be
proprietary).

regards
Andreas

[kvc]

Good question.

The portal should really drive your overall page navigation.  Remember, the WSF is a sample website showcasing how forms *can* be used - not how they *must* be used.  When deploying content to a portal, you will want to ensure that you content is well-structured (XML) and has decent metadata (embedded within the content XML).  Portal administrators creating new portal pages can add a portlets to their pages and configure those portlets to query Alfresco to render published content items.  But as far as navigation goes, that should be owned by the portal itself, as that is your run-time web app.

To create a portlet easily, you'll want to use our new web scripts in 2.1.0 Community Final.  This allows you to write your portlets using Javascript and Freemarker and hook in using a generic JSR-168 compliant portlet container for web scripts.  You can look at our out of the box web scripts for our JSR-168 compliant portlets in 2.1.0 Community Final (all using the same generic portlet container).  This should give you a good idea of what you can do.

Kevin

[deas0815]

Thanks your your comments on this one, Kevin.

In general it seems you prefer to use the portals navigation.

I conclude, that this approach more or less implies using content (forms)
unaware of navigation.

Another (possiblly complicated) approach may some kind of "navigation information
synchronization" to either make form content "portal navigation aware" or the portal
"content navigation aware".

regards
Andreas

[kvc]

Possible … much depends on the specific portal.

Keep us posted here on the forum.  Forums are great for sharing what you've done, as well as asking questions.  I think everyone would appreciate any insights you have from any navigation sync work you do.

I for one will be listening and learning should you post anything!

Cheers.

Kevin

[deas0815]

Ok, the portals under consideration are jboss-portal and liferay.

I'll keep you updated here.

thanks and regards
Andreas