Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Creating the Intranet “Classifieds” Feature using IBM WCM 8 – Part 2

In this blog series on WCM Based “Classifieds” intranet solution, we covered the Site Area, Authoring and Presentation Templates so far. In this blog we will look at the HTML & Menu Components, Categories, Authoring Tools Component, Workflow and Permissions and finally Creating the Page and Portlet.

HTML and Menu Components:
  • Menu Components
    • To list the three types of content items under respective sections of the rendered Marketplace, we use three menu components: menu_MktplcVehicles, menu_MktplcElectronic, and menu_MktplcOther. Each of these menu components pulls content based on the category that distinguishes each type of content. Each menu also contains the HTML markup to render the list of respective items.




  • HTML Component
    • This component is the main presentation component of Marketplace. The above three categories are put together using a jquery tab construct, and the markup for that resides in an html component called html_Marketplace. This html component is the top level component that is configured in the “Web Content Viewer(JSR 286) portlet”, and it calls the three menu components to render each tab view.

Rendered View of Marketplace:


Categories:
We use three categories under the Taxonomy - WCM/Marketplace - Vehicles, Electronics and Others - to categorize the three kinds of content items.

Authoring Tools Component:
This is the most important aspect of the whole solution. This is how “create” and “edit” features are exposed to the end users. An authoring tools component allows users with appropriate permissions to create new items, edit items, delete items or approve items inline on the live site. That means the users don’t need to access the authoring UI to author content.

We use two authoring tools components as part of our solution:
a) atcomp_ItemPost: This component allows users to create new items and is rendered as a button. The way we use this component is quite interesting, as we configured the component to use the Authoring templates defined in the rendering portlet. In the rendering portlet we add our three authoring templates. Refer to “Pages and Portlet section” for portlet configuration.


Since there is more than one authoring template in rendering portlet configuration, invoking this control displays a list of authoring templates to choose from (see below).


An inline interface displays the authoring template to create new content once the template is selected (see below).

b) atcomp_ItemEditDelete: This component allows users to edit or delete an item. In the Marketplace listing page, each item has an edit and delete option next to it if it was created by the current logged in user. Essentially, only the creator of the content item can edit or delete the content item. This can be setup by assigning a “Manager” role to “[Creators]” group in the Published workflow stage.

So far in this blog series focused on a WCM Based “Classifieds” intranet solution, we have covered the Site Area, Authoring and Presentation Templates, HTML & Menu Components, Categories, Authoring Tools Component. In the next and final part of this series, we will look at the Workflow and Permissions and finally creating the Page and Portlet.

Manmeet Gill is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics, an IBM Bravo Award Winner and a key member of specialized teams working on IBM WebSphere Portal, Content Management, IBM Forms and Collaboration technologies. He is certified in IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager and has over 8 years of IT experience. Besides specializing in IBM technologies he is a double black snowboarder, an advanced windsurfer and a superbike enthusiast. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from MSR Institute of technology, Bangalore.