This section contains the best practice web development workflow of CoreMedia. It describes how to adapt your resource files in the CoreMedia workspace with fast turnaround times and how you can deploy the files to the live system later (see Section 6.3.12, “Client Code Delivery” for details). It does not cover how to write CSS or JavaScript files or how to configure and use the CoreMedia CAE.
Web development usually takes place in IDEs or some other kind of source code editor. And since development of web resources, aside from minor changes, shouldn't take place in CoreMedia Studio, CoreMedia Blueprint has a solution, that lets web developers work with resource files in the workspace until the files are ready to be imported into the content repository.
CoreMedia Blueprint supports local resources as a simple yet powerful way for developers to work with workspace resources, rather than code objects in the content repository.
Figure 6.23, “CAE flow in detail” gives an overview of the idea behind local resources.
The browser requests a page from the locally started CAE.
The CAE requests the content from the Content Server.
While in development mode, the Content Server delivers content such as Articles and content items which link to the web resources.
In live mode, the Content Server also delivers the web resources to the CAE.
The CAE has got the editorial content which links to the web resources. Now, the CAE resolves the local location of the web resources and requests the resources from the file system.
The CAE reads the resources from the file system.
The CAE combines the content from the Content Server and the web resources from the file system and delivers the requested page to the browser.
Workflow
Figure 6.24, “Workflow in detail” gives an overview of the web development workflow including the interaction between the different locations of web resources. The "exported content" part of the local workspace contains files used for versioning content itself for later reimport into a different CoreMedia Content Management Server (find more in the section called “Exporting”).
The complete workflow comprises the following steps:
Editing the web resources to fit yours needs
Building the sources with Grunt
Importing the local changes to the Content Management Server and Linking the resources to the content.
This step is only necessary when you start with a new theme. Afterwards you can work with local resources until you want to publish the changes to the live system.
Previewing your changes in the preview CAE
Committing your changes (optional) to a VCS
Exporting the resouces (optional)
Software Requirements
On your computer you need the following:
The Blueprint workspace which contains the web resources
Your favorite tools to develop and maintain the web resources
A locally running preview CAE to visualize your changes immediately
Access to CoreMedia Studio to attach web resources to pages
For the development of web resources it is not relevant whether the Content Management Server used by CAE and Studio is running locally or remote. So you can use shared test infrastructure.
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