Having just gone through this process, I thought I’d share the steps I took to enable SSL in DotCMS.  On the DotCMS wiki there are some fairly brief instructions on how to enable SSL.  A quick search on Tomcat and SSL will point you to their documentation which explains it step-by-step.  So here it is all laid out in once nice How To.  Note that I am using windows and our Certificate Authority id DigiCert.  Your experience my vary.

Step 1:  Generating a Keystore

The first steps is to generate the keystore.  Tomcat, the java application server that DotCMS runs on, uses a format called Java KeyStore (JKS) for it’s keystores.  The Java SDK provides all the tools necessary to get the task done.  So, hop on over to where you have your SDK installed and follow along

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_03\bin>keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore C:\DotCMS_keystore.key

You will need to enter some information about your organization and location.  You will have have to choose a password for your keystore.  Don’t forget the password or you’ll have to start over.  You should now have a valid keystore with the alias of tomcat.

Step 2 - Generate a Certificate Request

With the keystore in place you could skip all the way to the end now and have a fully functioning self-signed certificate.  This is nice, but more likely you are looking to have a certificate authority such as DigiCert or Verisign sign your certificate.  To do this you are going to need to generate a CSR or Certificate Signing Request.  Thankfully the keytool takes care of that for us as well.

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_03\bin>keytool -certreq -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore C:\DotCMS_keystore.key -file c:\DotCMS_certreq.csr

You are going to be required to enter your keystore password, but this should generate the certificate request for you without too much trouble.  Now you can take your DotCMS_certreq.csr to your signing authority and submit a request for a certificate.  I am not going to cover that process because  I don’t do that part, my sys admin does.  Well, it is also different with each signing authority.   Once you have your certificate you are ready to start the next step.

Step 3 - Importing your certificate

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_03\bin>keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias tomcat -file c:\star_edinboro_edu.p7b -keystore c:\DotCMS_keystore.key

Again, the keytool handles the dirty work for you and you’ll need that password again.

Step 4 - Checking the details

You could probably skip this step if you know you have the right password.  Honestly the output of this command really didn’t tell me much other than I could see that my certificated had imported.

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_03\bin>keytool -list -v -keystore c:\DotCMS_keystore.key

Step 5 - Configure DotCMS to listen on Port 443

The next step is going to require you to head to your DotCMS’s server.xml  Add the following lines:

<Connector port="443" address="192.168.8.221"
protocol="HTTP/1.1"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
SSLEnabled="true" scheme="https" secure="true"
clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"
keystoreFile="C:\DotCMS_keystore.key"
keypass="..."  />

You will have to change the address and keypass to match your system.

Step 6 - Restart and test

That’s really all there is to it.  Restart your DotCMS service and you can use openSSL to test the connection just like telnet.

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_03\bin>openssl s_client -connect 192.168.8.221:443 -state

After it establishes a connection you should see your certificate information.  You will of course want to test the whole setup in a browser.

In order for DotCMS to use SSL you also need to set a page to use SSL in the properties.  Create a test page, but before you save and publish head to the advanced properties and check the force https option.  Now when you try to visit that page it should redirect you https if you are not already using it.

Hopefully this small little guide helps out anyone trying to figure out how to setup SSL in DotCMS.

Last week saw me in Miami at the DotCMS Open Minds Conference, Boot Camp.  DotMarketing’s approach to the conference this year was slightly different this year.  The focus was more on Training whereas last year was more like demo.  I’d have to say that I really enjoyed the conference.

Tuesday, Feb 3

My journey to Miami started a day before the conference.  I couldn’t get a flight in the day of the conference.  It was fairly uneventful (that’s good!).  The Hotel this year was the Mayfair.  A little more ritzy than the Sonata, but still very nice.  I ended up eating at the Johnny Rockets.

Wednesday, Feb 4

The conference didn’t officially start until the registration/welcome party at 6PM.  Since I was there quite early I decided to jump over to DotMarketing Headquarters about 1PM.  DotMarketing was nice enough to throw us Jason Tesser for some informal pre-conference training.

We talked a lot about the bits and pieces of DotCMS.  Here are some take-aways from that conversation:

• Lucene queries will no longer require the live, deleted, and language parameters.  The DotCMS code tries to be smart enough to put those in based on where you are in the system.  This should simplify the lucene quries in our code considerably.
• DotMarketing plans on hitting the Content Browser Search functionality with a hammer very soon.  They want to add a more intuitive search.  The idea is to make the search much more like a Google search.  A very simple one field search with advanced option and more intuitive operators.
• They removed multicast traffic in clustering.  This is coming in the next version, but it is a major improvement on the way clustering works.  At Edinboro I decided to nix the cluster because of the multicast issues on campus.

After the informal training we went back to the Hotel for the opening party.  I got to meet back up with Fienen and meet some of the new folks from the DotCMS Community.  A big welcome to IPFW who just made the decision to go with DotCMS and had a considerable force at the conference.  After the party we (Jason, Fienen, and some others) headed to the Knife for dinner.  The Knife was a very nice place to eat.  It is an Argentinian Steak House Buffet kinda thing.  Very Nice!

After dinner I had mega troubles with my laptop’s wireless.  So that’s why this post is coming a little late.

Thursday, Feb 5

Thursday started with breakfast at the Bookstore in the Grove.  The first session of the day was on structures and relationships.  I already knew much of the content here, but for the new guys this was a lot of bricks and mortar kind of training on the Back-End of DotCMS.  I did manage to grab a couple morsels of goodness from the session though:

• Relationships have an order field but in order to get the #PullRelatedContent macro to sort on that field you have to first save the order in the back-end.  Then, if you leave the sort parameter blank your results will be sorted by that field.  This is something I had been wondering how to do for some time now.
• You can also pass a lucene query to the macro.  Allowing you to drill down the results to just what you need.  I couldn’t think of an immediate use for this, but I’ll tuck it away for a rainy day.

The rest of the day, I spent with Jason Tesser in a one-on-one session.  This is the true value of the DotCMS conference.  I am really happy to see a company that will give you one-on-one attention.  Jason and I talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of the Content API and DotConnect Java Classes.  I learned how to use the DotConnect Class to retrieve SQL results from my server and then use the Content API to update and insert new content into DotCMS structures.  Very, very valuable stuff.

After the show a few of had a specialized training on administration of DotCMS.  We learned that you can use JMX to debug some of the more interesting problems may run into with cache and other things in the system.  It looked like really cool stuff, but it was a bit over my head.  Andres did a great job of showing us what can can’t be done though.

I ended up going with a rather large group to a sushi place for dinner.  I am not overly obsessed with sushi, but I went along and the place we went to was very nice.  I had a fried shrimp/lettuce/rice roll that was actually very good.

Friday, Feb 6

Breakfast was at the bookstore again.  We started the day off with Plugins Training.  The training was very well laid out and was my main target for the conference.  Jason covered a ton of information about what you can do with plugins and how they work.  I wish there was more actual code, but when you are talking to a large audience that kind of thing would’ve been hard to pull off. I can’t say how stoked I am about the addition of plugins to the DotCMS product.

One of the cool things you can do with plugins is move all your configuration and custom macros out of DotCMS.  This way if you ever need to restore a server or do an upgrade, you can just stick your plugin back in and you are essentially up and running.  I plan on doing this as my first plugin and hope to have a good post about how it’s all done.  That is, or corse, if Fienen doesn’t beat me to it

The last half of the day was on Ajax.  While I was not overly interested in the ajax stuff, it was interesting to see some of the cool stuff that DotCMS can do there.

After the Ajax session we moved into the Focus Group / Roadmap / Deiscuss / Wrapup portion of the conference.  I can’t tell you how impressed I am with the way DotCMS is developing.  Here is what is in store for us in the coming year:

• Enterprise Offeringe -vs- Open Source Offerings:  The idea is is to not turn DotCMS into crippleware.  There are quite a few CMSs that go the crippleware route.  In other words, you can have the software for free, but to really get the most out of it you have to pay.  DotCMS is going pretty much the opposite route.  The open source product will always be fully featured.  (Actually, it will most likely be more featured than the Enterprise. )  The Enterprise version will be the hardened product with better supoprt.
• Plugins, Plugins, Plugins:  Plugins give us a major shift in the way customization of DotCMS is handled.  From the simplest stuff like your configuration or a small macro, to the big stuff like new portlets.   Plugins also push forward community growth.  We hope to see the infamous DotCMSForge this year.  To add to this DotMarketing is also going to be putting on a plugin competition to get the community start on making plugins.
• 1.7:  What was going to be 1.6.5c is now going to be 1.7.  With this version, slated to come out in the next few weeks, we will see the addition of plugins.  Also, as a first plugin DotMarketing has created Front Ent Content Submition.
• 1.8: With 1.8 we will see fater releases (to the tune of 1 every 3-4 months).  1.8 will also add the concept of Binary Content.  This will allow us to dirrectly attach files to content along with exporters.  This esentially turns DotCMS into a digital asset / document management system.  Also due for 1.8 is drafting.  The idea is that it will work much like wordpress posts that auto-save or gmail messages.  There are also changed coming for content/page owners, which is something that has not worked as intended in DotCMS.  Lastly, it will add wiki-like link structures to DotCMS.
• Looking beyond 1.8 there are some big plans for this year.  A simplified UI for permissions, improvements to the Multi-Site Hosting UI, Push Publishing, a better forms builder with chaining, and access to content in the CMS view web services over CMIS.

Wrap Up

So, this has been a really long congolomo-blog post.  Sorry for that.  As you can see the conference was a great source of information!  I thouroughly enjoyed myself and I think everyone that came got a ton of value out of it.  Not to mention the networking possibilities.    There are some really cool things in store for us this year.  To say that I am giddy with anticipation would be an understatement.

Here are some additional links to information about the conference (more as I find them):

• Fienen’s Live Blogging of the Conference:  Post 1 | Post 2
• Fienen’s Flickr Feed

My weekly Warhammer Wrapup is up at WeekendGamer:  
http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/the-weekly-warhammer-wrapup-5/

Also, Don’t forget to vote for me in the .eduGuru Blogger Contest: 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DotEduGuru/~3/463906741/id1326-blogger-search-vote.html

Thanks!!

My weekly warhammer wrapup is up and ready for you’re viewing pleasure at WeekendGamer’s blog

http://waaagh.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/realm-war-changed-or-standing-still/

Check it out!!

I have been dabbling with the idea of separating my Tech/Work posts from my personal blog.  Just as I was thinking of purchasing another domain, along came the .eduGuru Blogger(s) Search Contest.

So, I decided to jump on over and write a guest post to enter the contest.  Head on over to .eduGuru and check out my post and don’t forget to vote for me:

http://doteduguru.com/id1182-xenu-broken-link.html

Thanks!

A little late in reporting it, but my Weekend Warhammer Update is up on Weekend Gamer.

http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/weekly-warhammer-wrapup-episode-3/

Due to the overwhelming reaction I received to my Twitter Post yesterday that I was going to vote Obama, I thought I’d post a few thoughts on why I voted for Obama and my thoughts post-election.  

Economy

I am a firm believer that YOU are responsible for your own situation.  Especially when finances are involved.  If you are not happy with your situation, change it.  Be glad you are an American and do it.  So, no, I am not looking for Obama to “Fix” my personal financial situation.  However, I think most people will agree that the U.S. Economy is less than stellar.  I have heard countless “Joe the Plumber” rips on Obama’s plan to “Redistribute Wealth”.  Here’s the deal folks, the republicans have been redistributing your wealth to companies that ship your jobs overseas for far too long.  It is time to close these loopholes and start the flow back into the middle class.  

Health Care

I don’t know that Obama’s plan for health care will be fix we need.  However, I certainly don’t think that taxing the little health care benefit I do get and then giving that money to pharmaceuticals and insurance companies will do anything but make it worse.  

Other Deciding Issues

As you can see, those two issues, along with Education, were the major deciding points for me towards Obama.  To add to the list, I did not like the thought that Palin could’ve ended up running our country.  Yeah, Barak doesn’t have much experience either, but he does at least know Constitutional Law.  That’s my personal opinion of her that was formed mainly from watching the Katie Couric interview.  Feel free to disagree with me.

The hardest decision for me was abortion.  I am against abortion.   However, I have to look at the options.  If Mckain was president, and he happened to get the “One More Judge” that they’ve been telling me about for the last eight years, and there happened to be a case that came to the supreme court to challenge abortion, what is reasonably going to change.  The most I can see happening is stricter laws against abortion.  It will be many years before they make it illegal.  On the hand, I don’t see anything changing in the other direction with Obama.  Like I said, it was a really hard decision for me.

So now what?

I think that this is great time for our country.  I have more hope than I have every had for our country.  But, I have to step back for a moment and remind people to not put all thier bets in one jar.  I am afraid that America is going to put all their hopes into Obama fixing her.  Some news for you:  It starts with you and in your own home, not the white house. 

In Obama’s acceptance speech he put it like this “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.”  I haven’t been around for many elections, but I share this Hope.  I have never been more optimistic and hopeful than today.  God Bless our new President!

I have been working with Expression Engine for the past couple of months on a website redesign for WhoIsGrace.com that we just launched last night.  Having worked with a few content management systems in the past, including Drupal and Joomla, all the way to the big guys like DotCMS and RedDot, I was happy to take on the task of building a site in Expression Engine.

Expression Engine is a PHP-based content management system that I would put somewhere in between Wordpress and DotCMS.  The focus for EE is mosting a site that is basically a collection of blogs.  For the free core version of the CMS you get a fairly full-featured content management system.  If you decide to pay the extra to get the personal licence, you get access to quite a bit more that makes EE a viable CMS for a small operation.

EE for the Enterprise?

While EE does offer a Corporate Edition at a reasonable price, I wouldn’t recommend it for a large enterprise.  If you have the ability to host a server that you have root access to, DotCMS is still free and has way more features.  Though if your a smaller oparation or individual and are stuck with hosting your site on shared hosting plan, I would recommend EE as long as you have a little programming know how.

Strength in Blogs

EE handles blog-type content very well.  It is very easy to set up multiple blogs and have them up and running very quickly.  It also has a nice mailing list module that makes sending a newsletter fairly easy.  Forms take quite a bit to set up if you want to do something custom, but there is a nice easy way to set up a contact form without too much hassle.  Though this might sound silly, I actually thought that making static content was too much hassle than it was worth.

How am I going to do that?

EE’s Template system is quite different than most CMSs I’ve played with.  I think of creating a few templates such as:  Homepage, One Column, Two Column, and Three Column.  And then each page follows one of those templates.  In EE each page is a Template of it’s own.  Now, you can do things like create templates to embed in other templates.  That way your you can reuse some content.  But they way it all works in EE just left me scratching my head quite a bit.  I found myself thinking .. “Now how am I going to hack EE to make it do this” … way too much for my liking.

Structured Content?

One thing that I really like about EE is how it handles structured content.  You can basically define your entries to have any feilds you want.  It was a little hard to figure out how to do things like image fields and the such, but the upload file functionaility in the Editor is nice a feature.  My users don’t have to worry about FTPing their images and documents to the system beforehand anymore which is really nice.  I also tried to integrate TinyMCE into the system, but I didn’t have much luck with it.  If I knew more about TinyMCE I am sure it would’ve been possible, but I had to spend my time figureing other stuff out.

Modules Everywhere

Another strength of EE is in it’s modules and plugins system.  I found it very easy to find and install modules to do a lot of the things that I needed EE to do.  One set in particular were the modules anmd extension from Mark Hout.

Conclusion

Expression Engine is a good choice for anyone that cannot get their own server with admin access.  It is as easy to install and use as something like Drupal or Joomla, but comes packed with a lot more features.  For $100 it makes a great buy for an indivudual wanting to run their own CMS.  I would definitly recommend using EE to those users.  However, for the enterprise, I still reccomend using and Enterprise level CMS like DotCMS.

If you do plan on trying out Expression Engine, I would highly recommend reading some of the tutorials from Train-EE.  I found his series on building a church website a ton of help when I was just starting out.

My Weekend Warhammer Wrapup is up and ready on WeekendGamer:

http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/the-weekly-warhammer-wrapup-2/

Go check it out.

My good friend at Weekend Gamer asked me to start writing a weekly post about my exploits in Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning.  I was glad to pick up the challenge.  So head on over to WG and read the post if you are interested:

http://weekendgamer.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/the-weekend-warhammer-wrapup