Alfresco Share is a project- or team-centric collaboration tool that has both a wiki and a document library (as well as other similar features). The wiki isn’t as powerful as a standalone wiki, and it doesn’t yet feature tight integration with the document library like you’re talking about, but it might be something to consider.

At one time there was a MediaWiki integration with Alfresco but I never looked at it. I think it had more to do with running MediaWiki and Alfresco in the same process. For what you are trying to do, I’d avoid that and instead see what MediaWiki’s extension model is. If you can write a little macro or something that knows how to hit an Alfresco web script to retrieve the folder contents, that’s the way to go.

Jeff

I read something about joomla and this integration with cmis. I’m familiar with joomla, but a wiki is really what I,m looking for.

Regards,

Peritico

These are all advanced back-end team-working editorial features which benefit the content producers, and are no use to the final content consumer (that is, the custom public website).

Thanks again for the blog post.

Whitehouse goes Drupal
From Personal Democracy Forum:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

This is a pragmatic decision because open source software is more likely to withstand time’s arrows (time’s arrow faces forward but it seems to fire them backwards at us), but it’s also important as a symbol: It is yet another validation of open software’s robustness and capabilities; it says that the White House is of and by the people, just as open software is; it symbolizes the Obama administration’s understanding of tech and its embrace of openness.

Can it be done as the DM currently stands? I don’t think so. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a reason to create a new store implementation in the first place.

Are the features you mentioned important? I think of the ones you listed, versioning is still important. But if you are building a solution in which you have a completely custom front-end making CMIS (or custom web script) calls to Alfresco, particularly if the front-end itself may not even be managed by Alfresco, I’m not sure Alfresco-provided preview or authoring sandboxes are that useful.

Jeff

I actually meant the layering of entire repositories (default behaviour for multi-user contribution) – not on a per-folder basis.

For those that don’t know: New stores are created for each user which transparently point to the staging store, so that they only contain the user’s changes, but they appear to contain everything. Promoting changes enmasse moves the delta from the personal AVM repo (or temp workflow repo) to staging repo, then the personal repo is flattened.

Jeff, do you think the independently edit/reviewed stores, change-lists, previewable stores, revert, roll-forward/roll-back of an entire site can be modelled in the DM? Do you think these features are even important enough to try and replicate in the DM?

BTW: I agree on your best-practice that folder-layering betwen web-projects is best avoided.

Tom

One of the things we included in our Best Practices talk was that layering “might not behave as expected” and that it is a feature that’s “best avoided”. It would not surprise me at all if layering didn’t make it into the DM. Again, speculation, but if I am trying to be as future-proof as possible, I think I would try to work around layering if possible.

Jeff

The future of Web Studio is unknown. All we know right now is that Alfresco hasn’t identified an Enterprise release for Web Studio. That’s quite odd when you see Alfresco talking about features 4.0 which is at least a year away. So we don’t know for sure that it will always be a Community project, but I definitely wouldn’t be counting on in any time soon.

In DC, John Newton talked about licensing Web Scripts and Surf under Apache. In Atlanta, I saw Web Studio included in that list for the first time. So maybe their approach will be to treat it as a community-supported development tool. We’ll see.

Jeff

I really appreciate most of the directions taken
regarding the evolution of alfresco.

I’m quite involved with web content management,
so the things that make me worry most are
native XML support and web studio. Native XML
support, because it would serve as the
foundation for referential integrity and querying of
(web)form generated content. Web studio as it is
the only authoring environment which is Surf
aware – I hope there is enough interest in it, so it
won’t die.

regards
Andreas