Required Developer Skills
The level of technology and coding skills required to do site development will
vary depending upon the requirements and features of the site. Designing and
architecting a site that properly utilizes and leverages OpenCms is an exercise
in itself, which we will not discuss in this book. However, we will discuss the
development tasks that are involved, once the architecture has been designed. In
general, we can think of four different developer levels and skills.
Basic Site Development
OpenCms may be used to manage content right after installation. One way of using
it is to import static fi les into the Vir tual File System (VFS) and utilize the publishing
and version control features to manage them. In this scenario, fi les from an existing
non-content managed website may easily be content managed. Files in the VFS
may be created, edited, and previewed in the offline staging area, before they are
published to the online file system. When published, versions can be taken to allow
for roll back, if necessary.
Files in the VFS may also be exported to the Real File System (RFS) and served
statically or by a web server. In this way, the website can operate in exactly the same
way it did, prior to being placed into OpenCms, except for the fact that it is now
version controlled. The following illustration shows how OpenCms can be used in
this fashion:
Utilizing OpenCms this way is straightforward, needs little, if any development
effort, and probably doesn’t require use of this book! However, it is worth
mentioning here that there are a number of sites that can take advantage of this.
For this developer audience, the skill levels will include the following:
- Operational understanding of the use of OpenCms
- Operational knowledge of Application, Web, and Database servers
- HTML coding capabilities
OpenCms also provides a sample site called TemplateOne, packaged as a module.
This module contains structured content types and templates. Although somewhat
complex and confusing, content types and templates provided with TemplateOne
may be used to construct sites without requiring development work. The
documentation for these templates may be downloaded from the OpenCms website
and installed into OpenCms.
May 21, 2008
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