What New in IBM’s Web Content Manager (WCM) Product

With the upcoming September 1, 2010 release of WebSphere Portal comes a new version of WCM.  Actually, the largest changes in the new release come from WCM.  The UI is very different and much easier to use.  They’ve put a lot of thought in making this something that really works for you.  For example, a lot of page loads are now light boxes or other UI control that doesn’t require a completely new page load.

Projects

• This allows you to bundle all sorts of things into one project and launch it at one time
• This is a pretty big change because previous to this, you had to do this kind of bundling manually
• All the changes in the project can be previewed together prior to publishing.
• It allows you to create a draft of the item and place it into the project, even if it has a normal workflow it follows.  These draft are isolated from the normal site.
• Projects capture all sorts of things in draft mode: Deletes, move of content from site area to site area, changes to content, etc. (Note, WCM things almost anything is content so components, templates, articles, etc are part of this.)
• You create a new project by simply clicking a button in the library explorer.
• Projects can cross libraries.
• There are options throughout the UI to add content items to a project.  (again, a focus on ease of use in this new release)
• You can preview the project as well.
• You can add new site areas to a project
• Demo: the speaker then demoed the project functionality showing how he would change the look and feel of a site.    Any object in the project shows a status.  Updated, new, deleted, etc.
• Future: will probably put portal changes into projects as well. (think themes, new portal pages etc.)

Workflow

• Draft operations are as fast as published items
• Can make a draft of almost any item
• Workflow can now be added to almost any item at any time
• On a workflow action, you can enable an offset to occur (start after 5 hours, expire this item one year after publish, send an email to notify of expiration one year after launch_

Authoring Templates

• New UI is first and foremost
• New File resources type that can be rendered directly rather than through menu and navigators
• There is a default presentation template now. ….for those of you who are too lazy to go and set that up when you create a new template
• Option selection can point to the taxonomy.  Really nice in terms of creating content and being able to categorize it from the taxonomy.  (easier for authors)

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Syndication and Administration

• New wizard to simplify syndication.  It used to be configured separately for syndication and subscription on separate machines.
• Pending and failed items view in the admin portelts.  Makes it easier to detect and resolve syndication issues
• Support for cross fix pack level syndication
• You can now edit system properties via WAS resources in WAS Admin console vs the editing config files manually that we have today.
• First failure data capture and message catalog improvements to make problem determination easier
• This doesn’t have anything to do with the product but the product documentation is better.  It’s restructured. they have more planning and conceptual topics.  They also continue to add content to the portal family wiki

Structural changes

• Site areas have replaced sites at the top of the content hierarchy.  (if upgrading, they are automatically migrated to site areas
• Components, authoring templates, and presentation templates can be organized into folders. (yeah, folders)  What we had before was all these things in one big list.

WCM Tags

• Tags can now be entered with square brackets
• Single Property tag for access information about an item. (easier now for developers)

Updated JSR 286 Portlet

• Filter chain that allows you to choose a specific page if you get multiple pages found and to choose a default content if no page found for an item.
• This is specific to search
• Now have a page title that can be set by default, resource bundle, or dynamic based on content.
• Also have portlet title options.  It no longer requires javascript in the theme.   You can set it via render header parameters

Tagging and rating

• This is tagging and rating for content and for Portal assets.  This is a rather large change considering that portal assets are kept in a completely separate database than the content assets.
• They provide render plugins for adding a tagging or rating widget to content
• You can publish additional information to the tag cloud about the current content item.  You can refer to the parent. You can get tags from the author template. You can use categories as tags.

Updated Web Content Pages

• You can delegate access control to the portal page.  (simplified approach to this to make sure that content shows up if they can see the page.)
• You can now show content as part of the friendly url.  This is cool because technically the portal page doesn’t change if you just display another content item so there is a deeper interactions between wcm content and a portal setting.

Public API’s and Extension Points

• JMS Events
• Query API is completely new.  You can query on 19 different parameters rangind from item, to library , to creator to authors, to workflow etc.
• Rendering plugin extension point.  This is like JSP’s but provide much more capability.