Webcenter Sites

PART 1

Before get into the webcenter sites details, we will have a tour on the internet and customer experience. If you are interested to learn more about the platforms and its evolution, please go through my blog previous entries.  Click Here.

In ancient days, the internet and websites were the monopoly of developers. There were no  importance for customer choices. But while growing the internet and web, web content management released for contributing the business information by the customers. For enhancing the customer experience we need to engage site visitors on it completely.There we heard the term - Web Experience Management, a solution for the customers to manage the business and customize or optimize their solution based on dynamic and interactive features.

WebCenter sites is a framework, previously known as Fatwire Content Management System for developing website solutions based on web experience management.After the acquisition, Oracle included the Fatwire content management into WebCenter suite stack.

Here I am covering the developer perspective of webcenter sites, that means how a developer can spend time on webcenter sites and how a developer can develop powerful content management sites based on web experience management.

Our website has content in Content management system and administrator publishes it to public for accessing the data. Webcenter sites will allow to create and manage content for publishing to our websites.
This content is stored in the webcenter sites database. Webcenter sites provides two interface,

Admin Interface
Contributor Interface

Using contributor interface, we create and manage the content. The content means it might be an image, or it might be a text or it might be an article which contains text, image and video etc. For creating and editing the content in webcenter sites, use content entry forms. The content entry forms are located in the Content Management System.Once the content is ready for delivery, content can be published to the website using either dynamic or static publishing. While creating the content, the content is stored in the CM database. Once it is published, the site users can access it. When published content is requested by a site visitor, the delivery system renders the content to the browser.

Ok. Now we will move to the infrastructure setup and we will check how we can launch webcenter sites for the development.Oracle webcenter sites is not available inside webcenter suite, like webcenter portal or webcenter content now. Now the webcenter sites is available in jumpstart kit - Oracle Webcenter Sites 11g.
It is light weight and portable version. The components are

  • Content management Server
  • HyperSQL - database
  • Tomcat - application server

Otherwise we can download the executable of webcenter sites (Fatwire content management server) and will install on top of the tomcat or weblogic server and will develop and configure the Jumpstart kit. Once the infrastructure is ready, we can start working on the development environment. The Oracle webcenter product contains many other servers along with content management server.

Mobility Server
Community Server
Gadget Server
Satellite Server
Gadget Server etc.

PART 2


Oracle Webcenter Site is a high-performance, large-scale content management and delivery system. Webcenter Sites developer creates the content entry forms which contributor will use to create content for website. Webcenter sites developer also develop the JSP that render content on the website. Content can be published to the website using either dynamic or static publishing. Webcenter sites support both static and dynamic pages.
The first task is to create the Content Management Framework for the online site. In order to build the framework, we need data model.
An asset is an object that is stored in the WebCenter sites database.
An object that can be
·         Created
·         Edited
·         Inspected
·         Deleted
·         Duplicated
·         Placed into Workflow
·         Tracked through revision tracking
·         Searched for
·         Published to delivery site
An asset type is a definition or specification that determines the characteristics of asset object.
Webcenter sites provide two data models for the asset types.

1.       Basic asset model
2.       Flex asset model

Basic Asset Types have a simple data structure. They have one primary storage table and simple parent-child relationships with each other. Each type of asset is contained in one primary storage table in the database. Basic assets of one type can be associated with basic assets of another type.

Flex Asset Model is a comprehensive data model. Each asset type uses several storage tables. In flex asset model, hierarchical data structure can be created. Child assets inherit attributes values from their parent assets.

The main functionality of WebCenter sites is to separate format from content. The advantage for separating the format leverages to reuse the same bit of formatting code for many pieces of content.

The formatting code is stored in files called elements. The code extracts the content from database and formats the content. Element files are stored in the ElementCatalog table in the WebCenter sites database. The names of your pages are stored in the SiteCatalog table. Each row in the SiteCatalog table is a page entry. Each page entry points to an element in the ElementCatalog table- root element of the page entry.

Webcenter Sites renders content into an online page by executing SiteCatalog page entries.

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