Understanding Alfresco Web Quick Start publishing

Question

For a better understanding of how things works, I am trying to build my own web site within Alfresco by replicating the same (hopefully) workflow publishing mechanism, but it's not working: I get nothing published or transferred to my supposed live folder.

I have created a folder named Authoring and assign type_ws.website. This should be the authoring and editing folder. Later I assigned this properties:

Host Name: localhost
Host Port: 8080
Web App Context: wcmqs
Site Configuration: isEditorial=true
Publish target: Publishing

Within authoring I created a folder named http and change its type to type_ws.webroot. I have to say that I have made two distint tentative, in a sense that I have later renamed folder to root.

Then I created a folder for my live content named Publishing, assigning the type_ws.website and following properties:

Host Name: myservername.com
Host Port: 8080
Web App Context: wcmqs
Publish target: none

The structure is the same as the demo Web Quick Start site.

Whenever I start and approve the relevant web quick start workflow, which are publish structure and then publish web asset.

Even if I am not seeing any error in all the alfresco log, I cannot see the content being transferred to my Publishing folder. Therefore the wcmqs web application is not displaying anything but a cannot render page 404page.

At this point I have two main questions:

1. Why the content is not being transferred from folder to folder (Authoring to Publishing) ?
2. Is web quick start and its corresponding war meant to be customized, or used as a general publishing mechanism ? Or is just to be taken 'as is' ?

UPDATE 27/02/2014

As suggested, I found out that any folder created within a webroot type folder get an index.html created automatically in it. I instead created my index.html manually in root folder, and its type was probably different from the one needed by the workflow. I copied the autogenerated index.html to the root folder and start the workflow from such html page. After being approved, the whole content get correctly transferred to Publishing live folder and therefore visible to the wcmqs application.

Answer 1

The answer to your second question is that the awe.war and wcmqs.war are meant to be examples of applications you can use as a starting point for building a web site that uses Alfresco as a back-end. They are definitely starting points, not as-is.

I am not sure why content is not being transferred from Authoring to Publishing. I would recommend importing the sample Government or Finance web sites and see the publish workflow works for those sites. If it does, then you can compare the structure, types, aspects, and property values with yours to see if anything becomes obvious.

If the publish workflow does not work for the sample sites, you may need to troubleshoot the workflow and/or file a Jira.