If you’ve tried to set up Alfresco 3.2 and use the WCM component, you’ve probably run into one or more1 of these problems:

1. When you click “Preview Website” you get an unable to connect message.
   • You need to start the virtualization server that provides the previews or configure it’s IP correctly.

2. When you click “Preview Website” you get a blank page and the browser is “connecting” forever.

   • You did the right thing and entered a root password other than ‘admin’ in the installer and now you’re being punished for it. Go and update the virtualization server configuration and give it the admin password you entered.
3. When you click “Preview Website” you get a response immediately that just reports “Virtual website not found”.
   • You started the virtualization server too soon after starting Alfresco. Restart it.
4. When you try to deploy the server it fails to connect.
   • You need to download and install the deployment server.
5. You’re trying to follow the getting started example, but when you get to creating content from the Press Release Form, it just gives you an error: Cannot resolve the name 'pr:company_footer_choices'.
   • You need to get the virtualization server working. Also make sure you have done the bulk import step and can preview the site.

Starting the Virtualization Server

There should be a ‘virtual_alf.sh’2 script in the Alfresco install directory. Run ‘./virtual_alf.sh start’ There’s also a virtual_start.sh but you’ll probably need to edit it to replace the @@ALF_DIRECTORY@@ placeholder that the installer didn’t replace.

Setting the Admin Password

At the end of the file ‘virtual-tomcat/conf/alfresco-virtserver.properties’ within your Alfresco install directory, there’s a property ‘alfresco.server.password’ this needs to be set to the admin password for your Alfresco instance. Keep this in sync anytime you change the admin password or your site previews will stop working.

Also note that the user/password you add here will be used for all previews so it bypasses any security you might have. Don’t deploy this on a publicly available site unless you have nothing to hide.

Installing the Deployment Server

No, it doesn’t seem to come with Alfresco by default – the documentation suggests there’s a way to enable it but I haven’t found it. Much easier to just download the component separately (from the main download page, go to “Custom Installs”, look under the WCM section and pick the obviously named package that works best for your platform. Install it by unzip/untarring in a directory and run it with the deploy_start.sh script.

There is configuration in the ‘deployment.properties’ file which most importantly controls where it deploys to. You probably want to deploy to a Tomcat server’s webapps directory or similar. The default config will however work for testing and put the deployed content into the ‘target’ directory.

Why Isn’t This in the Install Guide?

I have no idea. It would seem like something you would want to know about while installing.

1 – probably all of them actually↩

2 – .bat on Windows ↩

Andrew Shebanow in Open Government and PDF:

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed.

I’ve actually worked with a number of government departments who were looking to move more content online and the content conversion problem is definitely a time consuming and challenging part of the problem. That’s precisely why I wind up getting involved, since EditLive! lets you easily copy and paste content from Word documents and produce clean, compliant XHTML. It can even (optionally) strip out inline formatting and leave just the structure like headings, tables and lists.

Furthermore, EditLive! is actually quite good at making sure the HTML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed, especially when it’s been configured to suit the particular content needs. Even with non-technical business authors this can work very well and is doing so for a significant number of government departments.

That’s not to say it’s the whole solution, there are systems out there where it’s hard to convert the content to HTML and where HTML may not be the best format anyway. Some of those cases may work better with PDF but certainly not all of them. To somehow suggest that PDF is a complete and simple solution to publishing information on the web misses quite a lot of the picture. For example:

• How do web site visitors navigate around and get to that PDF data? How do they search and find it? As much time is spent working out navigation structures as it is converting content.
• How do you expose information from databases with regularly changing information? Wouldn’t a HTML representation be easier to generate than PDF in most of these cases?

Putting information on the web is not simple and no single technology is going to make it simple. PDF definitely has it’s place on the web, but so does HTML and a number of other formats. PDF doesn’t alleviate compatibility concerns, not all users have a recent enough PDF reader, not all PDF embed all the fonts and when they do it makes the download very large etc and not all PDFs are standards compliant. Putting non-web stuff on the web is always a big, challenging project, so review the available technologies carefully and pick the ones that best achieve your goals. Very few companies have success with just dumping a whole heap of PDFs on a web server.

I’m stumped so I’m throwing this one out there in the hope that someone might know the answer. I have a JSP component that builds a URL to create a new content item, in a specific site area with a specific authoring template. It works great on Portal 6.0.1.3 and Portal 6.1.0.0 but breaks on 6.1.0.1 and 6.1.0.2. When you go to the URL, it correctly starts creating content but instead of skipping the stage where it asks for an authoring template it just gives a blank list to choose from. If you omit the authoring template from the URL it will correctly list all templates and go on to create the content.

The URL winds up looking like:

http://iweb2.ephox.com:10040/wps/myportal/wcmAuthoring?wcmAuthoringAction=new&
type=com.ibm.workplace.wcm.api.WCM_Content&atid=com.ibm.workplace.wcm.api.WCM_AuthoringTemplate/simple-page/389d16004d3954ac9b4eff0a98a2531c/PUBLISHED&
pid=com.ibm.workplace.wcm.api.WCM_SiteArea/plugins/ca0d04004e034ec59853f8b5e96d1024/PUBLISHED

I’ve verified that the ID for the authoring template is correct by using it in an ‘edit’ action and the authoring template opens in edit mode correctly.

If anyone knows why this is suddenly going wrong I’d love to hear it.

Note to self:

That magical file that controls just about everything you ever want to control about IBM LWCM (at least so far as things that are controlled from the file system rather than the web interface) is under the profile directory at /wcm/shared/app/config/wcmservices/WCMConfigService.properties

This includes:

• configuring backwards compatibility for WCM 6.0 -> 6.1 migrations. Primarily the don’t expire content immediately when no expire date is set.
• setting up the SMTP server properties so you can get e-mail notifications in workflow
  • Side note: These get annoying really quickly if you’re not careful.
• A bunch of stuff on caching that looks cool. I wonder what the changes I just made will do…

Also, why did it take me this long to add fancy list bullet styles to my blog stylesheet? Mixing the blue and green is probably a bit much – I should create a blue tick or green arrow, but oh well, I’m drunk with power.

The Australian brings news of the growing battle for mobile banking leadership among Australian banks:

Brisbane-based Suncorp launched the first mobile browser-based banking service and last week made it compatible with iPhone and Google Android handsets.

The Commonwealth Bank has similarly updated its mobile service, which will work on any internet-enabled mobile phone, and has additional functionality for the iPhone.

People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for a long time. In fact, as the article mentions, the Commonwealth Bank had previously tried to jump on the mobile banking wagon as early as 1999 via a WAP interface. So what’s changed and what does this have to do with accessibility?

1. The capabilities and affordability of mobile phones with Internet access has dramatically improved. Firstly with the iPhone and now a top-notch browser is a must have feature in a smart phone.
2. WAP is out, users want the real web. It’s not ok to provide a text only WAP interface that works on phones, users want the full functionality and they want it to look pretty too. Modern phones support HTML, CSS and JavaScript and most of the time you should be writing just one site that works everywhere rather than a separate mobile site.

It’s that second point that really brings accessibility in. If you design your site so that it can be used with a range of disabilities, there’s a much better chance that it will also work on devices with a range of capabilities. In other words, someone using an iPhone to view the site is just a user with a particular type of disability.

• They have a small screen so the site needs to scale properly (use relative units, not absolute). If your site can handle users changing the size of the font, it can probably scale pretty well to fit on an iPhone.
• If the networks slow, they may not be able to see images. If you have good alt tags, they won’t need to.
• They can’t see flash. While you can design accessible flash, most people don’t so surfing without flash is often very similar to what a screen reader would see (at least for the flash side of things).
• They can’t use a keyboard very fast and can’t drag and drop anything.

There’s also plenty of unique things about various disabilities and the iPhone as well as different limitations on different handsets, but there’s also a lot of overlap.

Accessibility isn’t a cost centre – it’s a competitive advantage.