Friday, February 8, 2013

Creating the Intranet “Classifieds” Feature using IBM WCM 8 – Part 3

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

Workflow and Permissions
  • Workflow
    • The following workflow is used to manage the item lifecycle. By default, the item enters the first stage “WS_DraftMktpl”; it has a scheduled move action which moves the item to next stage in 1 min. The next stage contains the Publish action and publishes the item on the live site.


    • We could also use an approval process for each kind of item by inserting one more stage between the Draft and Publish stages for approval. Approver rights can be assigned to a group or person in the Approval stage, ensuring all content is approved manually by a group/person before it gets published.
  • Permissions
    • In order to enable users to post, edit and delete items on the live site, we configured the following permissions.
      • Page and Content Viewer Portlet– Map “User” role “All Authenticated Users”
      • Demo_Lib – Map “Contributor” role to “All Authenticated Users”
      • Demo_Lib\Content – Map “Editor” role to “All Authenticated Users”

First, you need to assign all authenticated users access to pages and the portlet, which render the content. Next, you want to assign permissions for Demo_Lib(you content library) and Demo_Lib\Content in order to provide edit, delete and create functions to end users.

All these permissions are set using Portal Administration Console.

Creating the Page and Portlet
Page - Here we create a Portal Page anywhere in the Portal page hierarchy and make sure end users have appropriate permissions to access that page.

Portlet - Place a Web Content Viewer (JSR 286) portlet on the above page. Edit the portlet and add the below settings.


    • Select the HTML component that renders the Marketplace view. This is a convenient feature in WCM 8 where we can directly render components instead of placing them on Content Items first.
    • Next, select the three authoring templates to act as input when you click the button “Post Item,” providing users with an option to select one of these to add as the new item.

Conclusion
In short, the solution is useful for building a classifieds-like site within your intranet or Internet site using Portal and WCM 8. This article only gives the general idea and concepts that can be used to build such a solution, but you can tweak it in numerous way to meet your specific requirements. Essentially, the main enabler of this solution is the use of the Authoring Tools component and the appropriate permissions to provide that component to end-users.

In the example we used in this blog series all the three items can be created using a single button that gives users a choice to pick an authoring template. This was our client requirement; you may divide your site into different sections based on different item types and have a different button for each item type. So, based on your requirements, you can choose an appropriate option to select authoring templates within the Authoring Tools component.

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.