[opencms-dev] OpenCMS related documentation besides documentation.opencms.org? Missing tutorials...

[Jochen Graf]

Hi Manfred,

unfortunately, there is no up-to-date book available. Using the docker 
image in combination with a proxy server is a very good starting point.

What you get with the "demo" component along with the docker image is 
the Mercury template [1]. The Mercury template in earlier days indeed 
was just a demo on how to build your own template. Today, Mercury is a 
quite sophisticated, modular, configurable "standard template" shipped 
with OpenCms which is used to realize quite different types of customer 
projects.

There is a set of "template variant" techniques [2] with which one can 
customize the Mercury template in many aspects. With these techniques it 
is not necessary to patch Mercury code any more, as in earlier days, but 
one can just choose the things one needs from Mercury, replace 
formatters with site specific ones, and add additional content types, 
formatters, dynamic functions, etc., of course.

It is still possible to build your own template from scratch. If you 
have very specific requirements regarding the HTML markup, for example, 
this makes also perfectly sense.

The docker image installs a Mercury demo site under /sites/default. 
Configuring additional websites is quite easy with the Websites app [3]. 
If you run OpenCms behind a proxy, choose the "Manual SSL encryption 
with endpoint termination". In the first tab "Basic setup", you can 
choose either the Mercury template or your own template.

As a next step, you would start to prepare your site header and footer 
with so called "Model groups" [4] and one or more page templates called 
"Template models" [5] to build up the sitemap. The initial setup of the 
model groups and template models is not so easy indeed. The demo site 
under /sites/default can be of help.

Hope this helps

Jochen

[1] https://github.com/alkacon/mercury-template
[2] 
https://documentation.opencms.org/opencms-documentation/template-variants/
[3] 
https://documentation.opencms.org/opencms-documentation/the-opencms-workplace/websites-app/
[4] 
https://documentation.opencms.org/opencms-documentation/template-development/built-in-content-types/model-group/
[5] 
https://documentation.opencms.org/opencms-documentation/template-development/template-models/

Am 18.11.22 um 16:13 schrieb Manfred Schenk via opencms-dev:
>
> Hello,
>
> after several years without posting here I have some questions:
>
> I’ve been using openCMS versions 5, 6 and 7 and also managed to add 
> custom datatypes to those versions for my private websites but with 
> the current version I’m not so familiar anymore.
>
> From my opinion what is lacking from the available documentation is a 
> detailed tutorial “How to set up an empty openCMS based server for two 
> websites and a common workplace”.
>
> After reading the documentation website and also some of the mails 
> from the mailing list, the way to go should be to clone the 
> example/demo site and adjust the formatters and templates.
>
> My goal is to replace my existing openCMS multi-site installation 
> (Tomcat 5 with OpenCMS 7.5) by a fresh install of the latest version. 
> I think I will have to recreate all the pages from scratch since too 
> much has changed inside the system in the last years. But this also 
> has the advantage to throw away all the old rubbish.
>
> But this also means not to follow the old tutorials on how to build 
> websites with opencms.
>
> For the old versions I also had some books, but these are of course 
> outdated now.
>
> So the question is: where can I find up-to-date documentation on how 
> to set up an openCMS based website?
>
> I also know the opencms-wiki (http://www.opencms-wiki.org), but the 
> information there is also kinda outdated now.
>
> I would imagine a tutorial following those steps:
>
>  1. Basic installation, e.g. install docker-based opencms (this can be
>     found on documentation.opencms.org)
>  2. Add reverse-proxy for TLS-termination with letsencrypt (this is
>     kind of standard and can be found in many apache or nginx-tutorials)
>  3. Configure opencms for additional sites (Here, the existing
>     tutorials are missing some detail information)
>  4. Create site-structure  (here, the existing documentation could be
>     enhanced also)
>  5. Create site-content (this is explained in detail on
>     documentation.opencms.org)
>
> More specific topics could be:
>
>  1. Using external auth providers like keycloak (I’ve done such an
>     integration for other CMS at work)
>  2. Transition from old custom datatypes to the current data model.
>  3. How to harden an opencms-installation? I do not want my sites to
>     appear on https://www.openbugbounty.org/ due to security issues.
>
> I do not request to get this information for free – if there is book 
> covering these topics I would pay for it. But I think the current 
> documentation is not detailed enough (or I have not found all of it now).
>
> Regards
>
> Manfred
>
>
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>
-- 
Alkacon Software GmbH & Co. KG  - The OpenCms Experts
http://www.alkacon.com  -http://www.opencms.org
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