[opencms-dev] Beginner completely lost

[Gregor Schneider]

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Shi,

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Shi Yusen<shiys at langhua.cn> wrote:
> I remembered there was a PPT on OpenCms's struture which made OpenCms
> quite easy to understand. The main concept is something like this:
>
> 1. an HTTP request to servlet container such as Tomcat;
> 2. The servlet container forwards the request to OpenCms;
> 3. In OpenCms servlet, enter org.opencms.main.OpenCms first;
> 4. org.opencms.main.OpenCms produces an CmsObject instance;
> 5. The CmsObject instance contains the resource to visit and security
> who visits;
> 6. If the user has permissions to visit, using the loader of the
> resource to load it to the response; if not, error in response.
> 7. You can extend resource, loader, user, group, permission.
>

What you've pointed out above is almost common to any CMS, and this is
not the point why I'm completely lost.

What's really puzzling me is:

- - Project:

Offline / Online - so far understood. However, if I create a website
from scratch, first thought would be to create a new project. But I
couldn't find any source how this could be achieved. In one of the
more helpfull tutorials, the editor writes

<quote>
     Projects – Like I said above, is either Online, Offline, or some
subset of Offline.  Basically, as far as I can tell, these are a way
     to organize folders in the VFS that you use for different
purposes.  For a website, you might define a project containing all
the
     relevant directories from the VFS.  Then, if you choose that
project, you will see just those folders and files.
</quote>

So does that mean, a new project is always part of the Offline-Project?
And when I create a new project, all files from the Offline-project
are shown in the explorer - are they part of the new project or not?

I rather feel that what I'm understanding as a "project", in OpenCMS
it's more what they call a "Module" - strange way of thinking,
though..

Not to menation that this tutorial is referring to version 6, meaning
it's quite outdated.

Next, quoting from "OpenCms 7 Development":

<quote>
    Registering the Content Type
    To register the schema file with OpenCms, we need to add an entry
into the module database. Modules are defined in an XML
    configuration database maintained by OpenCms. For most items, we
want to let OpenCms manage the contents of this file by
    using the Administrative interface, as no interface has been
provided for adding new content types. We thus have to edit the
    OpenCms module database file directly. The module database file
can be found at:
    <opencms_install>/WEB-INF/config/opencms-modules.xml
    Let's edit this file and....
</quote>

Meaning, I'll have to fiddle around with xml- and property-files on
the serverside each time I'm creating a new module which I personally
feel a bit anachronistic.

Anyway, today I've sent a mail to Alkacon asking for the
1-day-inhouse-evaluation-workshop ASAP from which I hope to get some
insights and hopefully a simple site with a new template up & running.

As you can see, I'm not to ditch OpenCMS since I like the following points:

- - it's Java
- - it's OpenSource

But what I really, really recommend to the OpenCMS-developers is to
create a tutorial form dummies "How to setup a website from scratch".
I figure that other companies which are not willing / able to spend
money for an Evaluation Workshop but having time / budget-pressure,
might ditch OpenCMS instantly and might move to some PHP-solution
which might give quick results but less security.

To all the guys contributing to this thread:

Thanks for all your recommendations and hints, I really appreciate

Cheers!

Gregor
- --
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