Web Studio doesn't work?

[whybish]

We are trying to follow the studio tutorials.  Currently we are trying them with 3.2 final, but we have also tried with the Nightly, 3.1 final, 3.0 final.
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Studio_Tutorials
When we click on create new website the "based on the following" field does not load (in either I.E. or FF)

When we try the second tutorial from a site built from scratch we get a massive stack trace when we drag and drop a web form from the data dictionary onto a page region.  When we try to edit the region the edit/delete icons are not there.

When we drop an html component onto the region and configure it the region gets completely removed from the template.  We now have a home page with no regions in it at all.

When we use an include component we don't know what to use for the endpoint and value fields, everything we have tried results in a stack trace being displayed.

When we use 3.2 final we only see three edit icons for the site, rather than the four in hte nightly build.

When we download the nightly build it shows it was built on ~18 June which is about 3 weeks ago.

When we make any change to a site in the nightly build (e.g. add and configure a component) the component editor does not disappear, it just blanks out and stays there.  When we refresh the page the page still hangs, so after each edit we need to shut and reopen the browser to view the results of the changes.  Some times refresh does 'work' but it sets the editing mode to preview and removes the sidebar, so that you need to change the mode and add the sidebar back in to continue.

When we create a web form and add content, the submit button is not checked by default.

When we create a content for a web form the content does not appear in the browse view (sometimes the xml appears for the content sometimes not, but the html never appears, although it sometimes appears in the modified items).

When we have created content for a web form we cannot see that content in studio.

When the studio icons are expanded so that all four (or three) are shown then mousing over them makes you realise that each is clickable.  This does not happen for the initial state where they are not all visible.  This made us think that studio was busted when we grabbed the version that started using these icons because the first thing you need to realise is that you must click on the icon that has no mouseover/alt etc that lets you know it is clickable.

When you log into studio the enter button does not cause the login to be submitted.

In some places in studio you have to click on the (very tiny) icon for a link to be followed but you can't click on the text.  For some of the context menus you have to click on the text, clicking on the icon causes the menu to disappear.

We can bulk import the sample.war file, but if we change a file in the sample.war file and redo the bulk import we get an error stating that the child exists.  To get the updates in we either need to create a complete new web project and redo all our work, or delete all the stuff that was imported previously.  It takes ~5 clicks to delete each thing and there are ~20 things to delete.  There is no option to overwrite.

When we try to submit the deletion we get:
javax.faces.FacesException: Error calling action method of component with id dialog:finish-button
caused by:
javax.faces.el.EvaluationException: Exception while invoking expression #{DialogManager.finish}
caused by:
org.alfresco.service.cmr.avmsync.AVMSyncException: 06080030 Conflict prevents update.

The sample site includes a footer webform and a press release webform.  If you create a press release content before a footer content then you get a textbox field for the footer, and whatever you put in will cause the creation to crap out during the next step of the wizard.  If you create the footer first then you get a radio button as expected.  Why allow the user to enter free text when nothing will ever work?

Is studio supposed to be usable?

[arash_kaffamane]

As you can see in Alfresco 3.2 Community Final the Web Studio is labled as Beta, which I would say its more Alpha 😉
It would be very interessting for me to know, when the first stable version is expected to be released (this year or next year?), as it is a show stopper for me at this moment to show it to my customers.

[uzi]

Hi everyone,

The version of Web Studio in Community 3.2 is still in Beta.

We pushed through a number of enhancements for Web Content Management in time for Community 3.2.  These included some pretty compelling requests including full clustering for WCM (both authoring and delivery tier) as well as a faster and more extensible deployment engine.  It also introduced the ability to plug in per-web-projcet custom preview URI services for previewing against test servers.

These were pretty important pieces because, without them, we'd be pretty limited as to the deployment options for Web Studio.

Web Studio - Good News!

That said, Web Studio does have a production release in the works that addresses many of the issues brought up by folks.  I expect that people will be very happy with the result and will also feel that it's much more extensible.  We've worked hard to ensure that it has good JS patterns for extension.

We've also taken the opportunity to clean up some browser compatibility-related things.  In doing so, we've made it much leaner (the Javascript total size is about 50% of what it was) and we've also done away with MooTools and YUI dependencies altogether.  The Web Studio overlays essentially only use jQuery at this point.  jQuery is pretty slick.

The goal is to provide a production release of Web Studio for Alfresco 3.3 which has a finalized API so that everyone can build custom extensions - things like new applications, sliders, drag and drop behaviours and even language translations.  To do so, we're sticking to what I feel are some pretty good Javascript patterns.

Folks who can see HEAD should be able to grab this in the coming weeks.  However, in terms of a preview drop, I would predict this to hit for Alfresco 3.3.  That's probably about two months away.

At that point, we'll get to have a lot of fun.  I'm curious to see who will write the most compelling plugins - whether plugins for in-context editing, digital assets browsing… I'm not sure!  Though… I can't wait to see what people come up with.

Michael