Book Image

Building Websites with OpenCms

Book Image

Building Websites with OpenCms

Overview of this book

This book takes you through the process of creating content-rich websites and applications using OpenCms. Although powerful and flexible, OpenCms can be daunting on first approach, but its advanced features reward the investment in learning. This book exists to ease Java developers into getting the most from OpenCms. OpenCms OpenCms is a professional-level, open source Website Content Management System, with which you can create and manage complex websites. Based on Java and XML technology, it fits into almost any modern IT environment. With hard-won experience of the practical difficulties faced by developers working with OpenCms, this book is the embodiment of the author's expertise, and the perfect way to master the system.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Building Websites with OpenCms
Credits
About the Author
Introduction

Master Modules


In Chapter 5, we looked at content definitions as a way of adding support for adding complex external data sources to OpenCms. In OpenCms 5, the developers added a significant extension to the content definition concept. This extension, called Master Module, was intended to alleviate the need to create separate tables in OpenCms for storing non-native data. The Master Module mechanism provides features, such as locking and publishing, that are available to built-in OpenCms types, but not to content definitions. In addition, Master Modules were supposed to be much simpler to create than content definitions. However, rather than becoming less complex, Master Modules added even more complexity to the already complex content definition mechanism.

As a result, OpenCms developers gave up on the idea. They did not supply documentation or even (as far as I know) release any code that used the API. But since the code is open source, external developers have discovered the API and have...