Building Sites with XIMS (Admin Guide)

Import/Create Site Directory

For demonstration purposes, we will build an example site for the Grey Dahut Preservation Initiative (GDPI). Sample content for that site is provided in the examples directory of the XIMS distribution in simple.examplesite.tld.

To build your site, you have two options to start with the SiteRoot content: First, you could create the content using the XIMS web user interface, second you can build the core content offline on disk and import it later using the fs_importer.pl tool. For our GDPI site, we will take the shortcut of importing the already existing files in the examples/simple.examplesite.tld directory. After cd'ing to the examples directory of your XIMS distribution, issue the following command:

Note: the script assumes that the password of the admin user is still the default password which is set after the XIMS installation. If you have changed that, you have to adapt the script.

[[email protected] examples]$ sh import_publish-simple.examplesite.tld.sh

This script will do the following:

1. Import the simple.examplesite.tld directory under /root using fs_importer.pl

2. Convert the imported folder to a SiteRoot and set its SiteRoot URL to http://simple.examplesite.tld using folder_to_objectroot.pl

3. Add DepartmentLinks for index.html,about.html,team.html, and contact.html using add_departmentlinks.pl

If everything went right, you should see Successfully added Departmentlinks to '/simple.examplesite.tld' in your terminal and the imported site should be available at http://yourximshost.domain/goxims/content/simple.examplesite.tld

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Create Role and User

Now, as we have got some content to work on, we need the users to get access to it. We will start out with creating a role for the Grey Dahut Preservation Initiative (GDPI) called GDPI.

Assign default bookmark to role

After going back to the User/Role Management screen, click on "Bookmarks" for the newly created GDPI role. The path to the default bookmark is /simple.examplesite.tld in this case. Before clicking on create, do not forget to set the new bookmark as default bookmark.

The default bookmark will be inherited to all users of the GDPI role.

Create user and assign role

Back in the User/Role Management screen, we will create a user called bender for the president of the GDPI and grant it the GDPI role.

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Set user metadata

You can move on to section Publish Site if you did not import your content using fs_importer.pl but created it using the web interface.

Because we have imported the contens of simple.examplesite.tld as admin, all the user medata of the objects points to the wrong person, as long as the admin is not the original author of course. In the case of the GDPI homepage president Bender himself is the author of the content. So, we want to update the imported XIMS objects accordingly, using the set_user_metada.pl tool in the admin subdir of the tools directory. After cd'ing to it, issue the following command:

[[email protected] admin]# ./set_user_metadata.pl -u admin -r -o bender -c bender -l bender /simple.examplesite.tld

This will set the owner, creator and last modifier of all 16 objects at /simple.examplesite.tld to the user bender. Note that set_user_metadata.pl requires XIMS admin privileges to run.

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Assign Privileges

Now, as bender is the owner of the content, we may want to give him privileges to actually manage it. We could do that through the web user interface, however doing it recursively using the user_privileges.pl tool in the tools directory is less painful for your mouse finger:

[[email protected] tools]$ ./user_privileges.pl -u admin -r -l MODIFY,PUBLISH -g bender /simple.examplesite.tld

Note: MODIFY is a shortcut for the VIEW, WRITE, DELETE, ATTRIBUTES, TRANSLATE, CREATE, MOVE, LINK, ATTRIBUTES_ALL, DELETE_ALL, GRANT, GRANT_ALL, and OWNER privileges.

After granting to the user bender, we want to grant VIEW privileges to the GDPI role, to let other possible future grantees of GDPI see the content.

[[email protected] tools]$ ./user_privileges.pl -u admin -r -g GDPI /simple.examplesite.tld 

Later, Bender can manually grant other privileges besides VIEW to members of GDPI.

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Publish Site

After you have created your initial content base, you may want to see how it will look like after it has been published. Per default, the XIMS config option ResolveRelToSiteRoots is set to '1'. As a consequence, all published XIMS internal references are created relative to the SiteRoot instead of being published relative to '/root'. For example, the link to the ObjectRoot settings file ou.xml created during export in the published version of index.html, like in every Document, will be set to '/ou.xml'. If ResolveRelToSiteRoots would be set to '0', the link to ou.xml would point to '/simple.examplesite.tld/ou.xml'. As ResolveRelToSiteRoots is set to '1' per default, you are expected to set up Apache virtual hosts for every site and direct the SiteRoot URLs to the according addresses.

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName simple.examplesite.tld
    DocumentRoot /www/ximspubroot/simple.examplesite.tld
    Include conf/simple.examplesite.tld.axkit-conf
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName staging.examplesite.tld
    DocumentRoot /www/ximspubroot/simple.examplesite.tld
    Include conf/simple.examplesite.tld.axkit-conf
</VirtualHost>

<Files *.html>
    SetHandler axkit
    AxAddStyleMap text/xsl Apache::AxKit::Language::LibXSLT
    AxErrorStylesheet text/xsl /stylesheets/error.xsl
    AxAddPlugin Apache::AxKit::Plugin::Passthru
    AxAddPlugin Apache::AxKit::Plugin::AddXSLParams::Request
    PerlSetVar AxAddXSLParamGroups "Request-Common HTTPHeaders VerboseURI"
    AxAddProcessor text/xsl /stylesheets/default.xsl
</Files>

Publish Objects

Now, as URLs, Apache, and AxKit are configured, you can start to publish your content objects. You can do that either by using the web interface or by publishing all at once using the publisher.pl tool in the tools directory:

Warning: If publisher.pl does not have the setuid flag set, you can only use publisher.pl as superuser or as an user with write access to the ximspubroot directory respectively!

[[email protected] tools]$ ./publisher.pl -u admin -r /simple.examplesite.tld

To have the expected results regarding the use of the DepartmentLinks portlet, we have to republish the SiteRoot. This will add the link to the - by now published - portlet in ou.xml:

[[email protected] tools]$ ./publisher.pl -u admin /simple.examplesite.tld

If you followed the example config so far and everything has worked, you will see the following index page:

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