WP installation and configuration: This can be painful.

First of all there’s very little detail in the installation manual on how to actually configure Webpublisher to work correctly. For example, here’s how you first set up a template:

1. To import your first Template file, first you have to know what an example template file should be, then you have to know that to import you must create a new “category” whatever that’s supposed to be, go into that new category and then import. Patched together functionality or what?
2. To edit your first Template, you need a rules file. So you go to the “Rules” area and create one. You go back to the Template, check it in (because it was checked out when you to edit it the first time), View/Associations and click on Rules, and Add the new Rule. Is this intuitive enough yet?

Second, once you’ve installed the WP, you have to install and configure Site Cache Services (SCS). Configuring the website publishing using Documentum Administrator is relatively straight forward, however, when it comes to figuring out what happens during a SCS publish, you’re kind of on your own. One thing to check is the SCS configuration in WP. To do this, click on “Web Cabinets”, select the cabinet that you are publishing, and click on “View” and select “Web Cabinet Overview”. This should show you the publishing configurations that were configured earlier using DA. Here’s what happens during a Site Cache run:
1. Either the SCS job executes or WP promotes a doc to Staging or Active which invokes the dm_webcache_publish method.
2. SCS service reconciles modified files with the configuration and the source SCS tracking table.
3. A properties.xml file is generated and sent over to the target SCS server.
4. Content is transferred via http or https to the target server.
5. On the target, when all of the files have arrived, target SCS processes database inserts and deletes if there’s a database, it expands zip_html files, it copies the files from the temp directory into the live website, and much more.

File extensions: htm vs. html
The first time you site cache the html renditions you’ll notice that the files are published with the “htm” extension. To get the files to publish with an “html” extension, you’ll have to make changes to the webcache.ini file located on the content server in the “/Documentum/dba/config” folder.

exclude_formats=xml
use_docbase_formats=true

You’ll also have to change the extension of the html format using Documentum Administrator. It took me a day of part-time rummaging through the forums to piece together this configuration fix.

There will be times when you want to throw up your hands and give into a beginner WP class, but by investigating this issues that arise first by browsing the forums at EDN and Bluefish and other site, you’ll learn as you go and more importantly remember what you did when you need to configure WP again.