When I initially started down the rocky road to learning SharePoint branding, it began with SharePoint 2007. Back then the branding experience, from a designers perspective, was seriously lacking. SharePoint Designer 2007, albeit a forerunner for FrontPage, was somewhat helpful as I embarked on my journey. My first SharePoint branding project was an intranet for a client, and the firm I was working for at the time, gave me free reign on the overall design and layout of the site. When I conducted my research into how to change the look and feel of the site, I felt that customizing an out-of-the-box theme was too limiting. Sure I could have gone into the hive and copied an existing theme folder, and then customized it. However, this strategy didn't meet my requirements. I wanted more control over the design of the master page and page layout. In other words, I wanted to have this site not look like SharePoint at all. 

Background

At nearly all my recent engagements, clients have needed a means to collabarate, document and publish information across the organziation.  Specifically, the information needed to be easily accessible, secure and configurable.  In some instances, the client purchased expensive out of the box content management systems while others preferred using open source options.  Each system offerred its own set of benefits and drawbacks. 

Challenge

In my research, I encountered a myriad of products which satifisfied the client's requirement to identify software that provided the ability to collaborate and document the organization's information.  To my amazement, the number of options available were overwhelming, each claiming to provide features and benefits over others.  My challenge became not in finding software which accomplished their need rather in sifting through the mountains of options available.

After being involved with recent Alfresco-based enterprise portals, Iʼve begun reflecting on best practices in regards to integration with the popular open-source CMS.  This article describes some learnings on integrating Alfrescoʼs Document Management (DM) and Web Content Management (WCM) repositories with an enterprise portal.

It pays to use a separate web form for each web content type.

My client uses web forms in Alfresco 3.0E to create web content.  This means that when users want to create HTML (web content), they open an "authoring" form (defined ahead of time using XSD), populate its fields with the desired content, and save it.  On save, Alfresco does two things:

• saves the content item as an XML file;
• transforms the XML to HTML using an XSL rendering template (also written beforehand).