I’ve created a screencast over at Optaros Labs that shows a simple web site, powered by Django, that pulls all of its content from Alfresco.
At Optaros, we see Django and Alfresco as a powerful combination for building content-centric applications. The integration shown in the screencast is based on work we did for our friends at Neiman Marcus. An open source version of this integration will be available within a week or so.
Hi Jeff,
Nice screencast!
I’m curious why you chose to integrate with the ECM portion of Alfresco, and not the WCM side? It would be nice to be able to use the WCM deployment tools to be able to serve content from an Alfresco runtime, separate from the authoring environment. I don’t know if this is possible with the ECM functionality in Alfresco.
Darren,
Django communicates with Alfresco via web scripts. The web script API can talk to the DM repository and the AVM repository. So, if you wanted have your Django-powered site pull content out of the AVM store instead of the DM store you would start by changing the web scripts.
As to why we chose the DM over the AVM, the DM store is easier to work with. We use it by default unless someone has a specific reason to use the AVM store. As you mentioned, deployment might be one reason (although deployment is supposedly coming to the DM side of the house in a future release). Another reason would be to take advantage of sandboxes, layers, etc.
If there is significant demand for working with the AVM store we can bump that up in the roadmap.
Jeff
Thanks Jeff, that makes sense.
Personally I wish Alfresco could find a way to merge the two product lines. There are elements of both that I’d like to use on projects, and it’s always frustrating to find out the feature that could help your project is only available on the other side of that fence.
+1 for AVM integration.