Alfresco to manage my company's website content

So the story is as follows...

I was put in charge of setting an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System with Web Content Management (WCM) capabilities to manage the content of my company's new website.

Initially, this release would be a 'brochure' (static content) website. In the future it may escalate to host dynamic content. Pretty simple and straightforward.

The catch? It had to be an Open Source solution.

Having played before with Alfresco it seems like a perfect fit. Once the HTML templates (developed by the Graphic Designer) are ready, they will be uploaded to Alfresco. Separation between content is a must, so Alfresco Web Forms will be used. This basically means well define an XML schema for content structure so Alfresco can render it as an HTML Form for user input, generating an XML file. Once the content is ready a transformation (XSL, FSLT) will be applied to produce HTML, Plain Text, etc. on the predefined folders of our website structure.

We'll take advantage of Alfresco's Sandboxed development. These means each of the users authoring content to the website will have their own sandbox to make and preview changes before submitting their modifications for review and later on, publish to the website.

Since my company's publishing work flow is simple, we'll used the predefined publishing work flows and roles Alfresco provides out of the box.

My company hosts it's website externally so we'll need to use Alfresco deployment capabilities. The problem is we cannot install this module in the hosting provider server, which by the way is only an HTTP server. WFTP access is our only way in, so I'll have to find a work around to solve these issue. More on this issue in the next posts.

I'm planning to give a more detailed overview of the tricky parts of the installation. I just wanted to give a brief overview of the latest task I have in my hands. Below is the software products I will be using. See you later!

Software Configuration:

• alfresco-community-war-2.1.0


• alfresco-community-wcm-2.1.0


• alfresco-community-deployment-2.1.0


• jboss-4.2.2.GA


• jboss-native-2.0.1-windows-i686-ssl (to install jboss as a windows service)


• MySQL 5.0


• mysql-connector-java-5.1.5


• OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 (for some transformations)


• jdk-6u3-windows-i586-p


• ImageMagick-6.3.7-3-Q16-windows-dll