The GST Site Foundation (”GSF”) was designed for FatWire Content Server 7.6, and it has proven very useful for many customers. With the release of Oracle WebCenter Sites 11gR1, some significant changes were made that impacted the GSF. The biggest by far is the change to the role of the Page asset.

Pages in 11gR1 are “Complex Assets” that are “templatable”, which means they can be assigned attributes via definitions. (Strictly speaking they are not Flex assets, because they can’t be assigned parents, be involved in related item recommendations, among other things, but they do share this definition feature.) In addition, the UI integration of the Page asset in the new Contributor UI is much tighter than it was in the Advanced UI in Content Server 7.6.

The GSF assigned the 7.6 Page asset the role of “provider of navigation structure” only. In 11gR1, the Page is positioned to be a web-referenceable asset (”WRA”) itself. This means that the 11gR1 is architecturally incompatible with the GSF’s use of the Page asset. An adjustment must be made.

Strictly speaking, the GSF 1.3 will work on 11gR1. Instructions on how to do it will be provided in the next post. No changes need to be made to the GSF architecture, and all previous sites will continue to work.

GSF 1.3 is compatible with Oracle WebCenter Sites 11gR1 for sites built with the 7.6 / GST 1.0.3 architecture specification.

To take advantage of the NEW features in 11gR1 with the GSF, some changes to the architecture are required. Primarily, it is necessary to expand the role of the Page asset to allow it to also be a WRA. Once this is done, Pages can take advantage of full WRA roles. There are a some code issues that arise though when switching architectures. The <gst:navigation> and <gst:multilingual-navigation> tags stop working properly, because they expect the Page asset to have an unnamed association to the WRA, and we don’t have to do this in 11gR1 anymore.

We are planning to release a final 1.3 edition of the GSF in late July, 2012 (it’s almost ready to go, we’re just addressing some 11gR1 installation complications). Immediately after that, a new branch will be created for version 2.0, which will include native support for 11gR1 features. Stay tuned in the month of August for details about this change.

Enjoy!

Tony
Metastratus Web Solutions
www.metastratus.com