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).