Saturday, October 24, 2009

Getting Hippo Site Toolkit demo to work

While figuring out Hippo and its architecture, I found some annoying errors in the documentation. While the documentation at http://www.onehippo.org/site-toolkit/home reads:
1. Download the wars, drop them in your Tomcat servlet container and start Tomcat (see in_servlet_container, but with different wars).
2. Checkout the HST2 project, start the cms and the site of the demosuite in the buildin Jetty servlet container.

So I use Tomcat, and its saying in another page to rename the cms war to cms.war, there is no mention of renaming the site war to site.war. But in the rest of the documentation the assumption is made to use the /site URL. I'm no Tomcat guru, so how should I know that the webapp wars are used as URI shortcuts ;).

But that's the main pain in the ass with OSS documentation, it's mostly incomplete. How hard should it be to test your HOWTO for a plain and simple demo. Adding a simple step 1.5: "rename the cms war to cms.war and the site war to site.war" isn't a big deal, but makes a difference of about 1 hour for a Hippo n00b figuring out what's going on!