[opencms-dev] Some questions about OpenCms regarding a potential deployment

[Yves Glodt]

Hello,

we need to build a large mulitilanguage website and the CMS we have used so 
far for our projects seems inappropriate for this task. That's why I started 
to look into OpenCms. I have installed it so far on 2 different machines (one 
running Debian Sarge and one Etch) to familiarize myself with it. What I saw 
impressed me. I looks like OpenCms provides what we need.

The site we have to do will have 2 menus, one simple, and one will be a 
hierachical tree menu. The "Templateone Demopages" show almost all we will 
have to do, apart of the global language-switching possibility we need to 
provide.

Many pages will need to exist in the CMS without being linked to from a menu, 
and the editors should have the possibility to add them to content with 
simple links, but stil choosing the page from a list (without errorprone 
url-typing).

Also, we will need to setup an ordinary apache in front of it to get the urls 
pretty (without any /opencms in the urls)

There will be several forms on the site (contact, callback service, a bonus 
calculator) which I guess can be easily done as jsp pages and integrated into 
OpenCms.

In the attached mockup (yes I am fully aware I completely suck at drawing ;) 
you can see the structure of the site. Basically, only the content (and 
sometimes the headergraphics) in the middle will change per page.
Sooner or later there will be a teaser with related content.


So far the introduction, now my questions:

- Even after some hours of playing with opencms I still fail to understand how 
to create a template. Where and how to I have to create the jsp which will 
serve as a template, and how to I create and refer to the content I want to 
include with <cms:include element= "myElement" />  (what do I have to 
call "myElement" to have it included by this tag? Does it have to be 
a "pattern page", or a "structured page"? Ahh I am so lost :-( )

- If I have a link in a menu, how and where can I tell that this particular 
link should open the template and display the appropriate item in the 
content-area?

- I could not find any 3rd-party templates on the web... Are there sites which 
offer collections of templates for download?

- For anoter project (which if this ones will be done with OpenCms I also want 
to do with it) I will need a guestbook. I could only find one from a company 
called metamesh but it seems to be for version 6.0 only. Is there any other?

- I could not find a book about OpenCms 7.0.Ishere any?

- I read in the archives that someone had tried to run OpenCms with Firebird.
Is there more information available on this? If possible we would like to use 
Firebird 2.1.


Sorry for the long post... :-)


best regards,
Yves
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