Web Quick Start enhancements in 3.4.c

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Web Quick Start enhancements in 3.4.c

bremmington
Alfresco Employee
0 0 5,467
Alfresco 3.4.c Community release has just been released, and there are a few enhancements to Web Quick Start that are worth a mention.

Word-to-HTML conversion



A new rendering engine has been plugged in that takes .docx files and renders them into nice clean XHTML suitable for styling with CSS, and extracting images with appropriate embedded references to them. For example, if I specify a new rendition configuration named 'docxToHtml':

<bean class='org.alfresco.module.org_alfresco_module_wcmquickstart.rendition.BootstrapRenditionDefinition'>


<property name='name' value='docxToHtml' />


<property name='renderingEngineName' value='htmlRenderingEngine' />


<property name='parameters'>


<map>


<entry key='runAs' value='System' />


<entry key='destination-path-template' value='${cwd}/${name}.html' />


<entry key='bodyContentsOnly' value='true' />


<entry key='imagesSameFolder' value='true' />


</map>


</property>


</bean>


and then specify that that rendition should be triggered on the blog section of the WQS website whenever a docx file is uploaded by setting the 'Rendition Config' property on that section (note the ridiculously long MIME type):



If I then upload a Word document into the blog section of the website then it will be converted automatically into XHTML. As an example I uploaded the original Word version of one of Ben Hagan's blog posts, one page of which looks like this in Word:







Once uploaded into the blog section of the WQS site, browsing to the generated HTML rendition in Firefox looks like this:







No manual processing required - as soon as the upload of the original Word doc finished this HTML version was available to look at on the website. The markup's nice and clean too.

Asset-by-asset template override



Previously, it was possible to specify which page template to use on a type-by-type and section-by-section basis. That is to say that you define rules such as 'when rendering an article from the blog section use the 'articlepage2' template' or 'when rendering the landing page of the news section use the 'sectionpage3' template'. That remains the case in 3.4.c, but we have also added the ability to specify the template to be used for an individual asset. This is quite handy if you want most assets in a particular section to be rendered in a particular way but need one or two to look different.



We use it in the case of the homepage of the WQS website, as we want the default landing page template for sections to be 'sectionpage1', but for the landing page of the root section (the homepage of the website) we want to override this to use the template called 'homepage'. Therefore we set a template mapping on the root section for the normal case ('ws:indexPage=sectionpage1') and override the template on the index.html asset in the root section to be 'homepage':







Support for multiple WQS web apps in a single web container



In 3.4.b the logic that the WQS API used to determine which website was being addressed made use of the requested host name and port number but not the context of the addressed web application (the part of the URL that is 'wcmqs' in an out-of-the-box installation). This has been resolved in 3.4.c so that all three components are used to look up the correct website in the repository. The effect of this is to make it much simpler to deploy multiple websites that have differing functionality, since they can now all be deployed in a single instance of Tomcat, for example, without having to define multiple host names.



And some bug fixes, of course...



In addition to these things we have also fixed up some WQS bugs that we and members of the Alfresco community found in 3.4.b. As always, we're keen to hear your thoughts and ideas for future enhancements. If you have questions about or ideas for Web Quick Start then please visit the Web Quick Start forum and let us know. If you'd like to find out more about the Web Quick Start then take a look on the wiki.