I am starting with this post a series that aims to be a tutorial on WebCenter Site (the new name of Fatwire Content Server).
In my plans, once completed you can use it as a gentle introduction to WCS, useful to be read before approaching the long (and complex) documentation. For this reason, I will focus more on the concepts and less on the details, leaving to the official documentation the task to delve into the specifics of every subject.
In this first post, I am just introducing some fundamental concepts of WCS.
It is not immediately obvious for anyone who have not seen the evolution of the product, that it is actually built of some different layers. This fact was more evident some time ago, when they were installed separately. Since now you install everything out of a single installer you may need some explanation to see those layers.
Knowing those layers is actually useful to better understand how WCS works. I am referring to those layers with their original name, because when you develop for WCS you will see them in the code: internally those names are still used.
The first layers is Content Server in the proper sense. Although until recently the official name of the whole content management product was "Fatwire Content Server", in the original naming Content Server is only the first layer. Content Server is basically an XML based web programming language, similar (as a concept - not in the specific details) to ColdFusion, a web programming language that was "hot" at the time of the initial development of the product (around 1995).
Content Server was further extended adding to the XML based programming language (that is still there) a more powerful and more standard JSP based programming language. Both the XML and the JSP share the same underlying libraries, so everything that can be done in XML can be also implemented in JSP.
ContentServer however is mostly just an execution environment, with some features like security and caching, but it has no concept of assets, nor a proper user interface (except a very limited one used mostly to configure security). You can think to it like a sort of JSP engine, more powerful than just the JSP engine you can find in a standard application server, but definitely not an application.
It is the underlying engine used by the other components.
When you use WCS, you normally expect to log into it and manage some content. Built on top of ContentServer, there is the Xcelerate application, that has a web user interface. Xcelerate is different from ContentServer since the former is built with the latter. Xcelerate also features a rich user interface, allowing to create and edit content.
Xcelerate implements the more important concepts of WCS: the Asset. There are some predefined assets like the Page and the Template, and more assets can be created. Xcelerate actually implements only the concept of Basic Asset, giving you the ability to create more basic asset definition using the Asset Maker. In the original design, Xcelerate is an engine good for developing even complex web sites but with having a content model that is pretty stable and not expected to be changed often.
A further extension of Xcelerate is Gator, that basically implements the concept of Flex Asset. Flex Asset were originally designed to easily implement e-commerce web sites. A typical problem of e-commerce is that the content model can be very complex and changed often, sometimes daily, so the Basic Assets were not enough flexible for this purpose.
Flex Assets fulfill the flexibility this requirement, providing the ability to change the content model easily, keeping the existing content safe, and allowing an easy update of the site, as simple as the publishing.
Publishing, normally used to just update the content, cannot be used to update the content model when using only basic assets. But you can update the content model using Flex Assets, and then just publish them to update the site.
Gator also implements the ability to customize the administrative user interface introducing also the concept of Attribute and Attribute Editor.
Another layer is Engage (once called "Marketing Studio") that further extends the feature set of the system, providing the ability to store attributes of the user (Visitor Attributes), build rules based on them (Segments) and generate content dynamically (using the so-called Recommendations and Promotion).
The analysis is not actually complete: there are other components in the full system; they are built however on the same foundation but integrated, so I will stop the analysis here. I reserve to provide more details about the other components in a future post.
