Web Project Tools

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The official documentation is at: http://docs.alfresco.com

Forge Projects
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Table of Contents

• 1 About Web Project Tools


• 2 Support Disclaimer


• 3 What is Web Project Tools?


• 4 Web Project Tools Wizard


• 5 Web Project Export Wizard


• 6 Web Project Import


• 7 Installing Web Project Tools


• 8 Where can I download sample Web Projects?


• 9 Feedback and Contributions

About Web Project Tools

Web Project Tools is an Alfresco Forge Project that provides additional tools for administering your Web Projects within Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM).  These tools are not part of the core Alfresco product and are not supported by Alfresco.  Rather, they are a set of useful tools that have been put together to provide some additional functionality that Alfresco WCM does not (currently) provide out of the box.

Support Disclaimer

Once again, it is important to note that this is a Forge project and not part of the Alfresco core product.  They are supported purely by the Community.  Please try out the tools and see if you like them.  But bear in mind that if you choose to use them, you use them at your own risk.

The Web Project Tools are distributed and licensed under the GPL.
The Web Project Tools are currently distributed only for Alfresco 2.1

What is Web Project Tools?

It is basically an AMP file that you can drop into your Alfresco installation.  To do so, grab wcmsitetools.amp and install it using the Alfresco Module Management Tool.  You read about that on the AMP Development wiki page, or you can follow the installation instructions below.

Once you've deployed the AMP, you'll have two new wizards available within your web projects actions menu - The Web Project Tools Wizard and the Web Project Export Wizard.

Wcm-tools-1.jpg

Web Project Tools also includes module components (which can be executed in your module-context.xml file) which let you bootstrap WCM web sites.  This is talked about later in this document.

Web Project Tools Wizard

The wizard provides you with four options.

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The first option is certainly the most interesting.  It will analyze your entire web project and look for the following things:

1.  XML files in the project tree that do not have associations to web forms but potentially should have these associations.

2.  XML files in the project tree that do have associations to web forms but the web form has been deleted or is otherwise missing.

3.  XML files that have associations to rendition files that do not exist.

When you click Next, the wizard will do its thing and analyze your web site.  It will then give you back a report.  The screen shot below shows a simple report.

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In this example, two XML files were copied into the AVM (via CIFS) and, as such, they do not have any association to their web form (company-footer).  The tool has detected this and notifies the user that it can make a correction - it can re-associate the XML to the web form that it thinks is the right one.

The next screen is then a summary of the operations that are to take place.

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When you press Finish, the tool will make all of these corrections for you.

Web Project Export Wizard

The Web Project Export Wizard is not yet finished.  But it soon will be.  The idea is that you can go to your web project and export it.  This produces an AMP file.  The AMP file contains the following:

* The staging sandbox web files and structure (as a WAR/ZIP).
* The web project's associated web forms (ACP)
* All of the web project's workflows (to be determined)
* Sandbox configuration and user roles

These are bundled into an AMP for you and then dropped into the repository.  You can then store it away, give it to friends, or port it to another computer for further testing.

Web Project Import

This tool also provides the framework necessary to support Web Project imports.  These are the very AMP files that the export wizard will generate for you.  If you're bold enough to build one by hand, Web Project Tools can import it for you!

Right now, you still have to build them by hand.  That said, we've put a few up on the Forge that you can grab and you can try right away.  Please visit the Web Project Library page for information about these packages.

Installing Web Project Tools

This is pretty simple.  Just grab the AMP file (see above) and save it in your Alfresco directory.  If you have an /amps directory, you can save it there as well.

Next, you will need to make sure you have the alfresco-mmt-2.1.0.jar file.  This is available from Alfresco via its public distribution.

Once you have these, you can just run something very much like this:

java -jar alfresco-mmt-2.1.0.jar install /alfresco/wcmsitetools.amp /alfresco/tomcat/webapps/alfresco.war

This is covered in greater detail on the Wiki page for the Alfresco Module Management Tool but that's the general idea.

Once this is done, your alfresco.war file should be updated!  You will then want to do the following:

1.  Remove the exploded alfresco directory (if one exists).  On Tomcat, this folder is located in /alfresco/tomcat/webapps.  You'll see an alfresco folder in there and you will want to delete the entire folder.  That way, when Tomcat starts up again, it will automatically re-deploy Alfresco and you won't have any troubles.

Where can I download sample Web Projects?

The Web Project Tools project includes several sample web projects that you can quickly deploy to get a taste of Alfresco Web Content Management.  These are community-sponsored projects and are available from the Web Project Tools forge project.

Visit the Web Project Library Wiki page for more information!

Feedback and Contributions

We're hard at work on the next version of the tool and would enjoy having your contributions on the project.  If you have any feedback or if you would like to submit a bug fix or offer assistance, please contact us at the Web Project Tools Forge project!