So after a brief hiatus, it is time to get it going again. We do these on the first Wednesday of each month and that means this Wednesday is the day. Our topic will be “Packaging and Deployment Best Practices” and with the panel we’ve put together it should be lively and entertaining. Joining me will be Richard McKnight, Gabriele Columbro, Jared Ottley, and Richard Esplin. We’ll be talking about the new Add-Ons directory, AMPs, Maven, and all sorts of good stuff around packaging and deploying extensions for Alfresco.

Register here. The session will be recorded, so if you miss it, you can catch up later.

What this means is that you can now use Python and cmislib to work with Alfresco aspects. Patrice’s extension adds “addAspect”, “removeAspect” and “getAspects” to Document and Folder objects. It also allows you to call getProperties and updateProperties on Folders and Documents even when those properties are defined in an aspect.

Check it out:

properties = {}
properties['cmis:objectTypeId'] = "D:sc:whitepaper"
properties['cmis:name'] = fileName

# Add two custom aspects and set aspect-related properties
doc.addAspect('P:sc:webable')
doc.addAspect('P:sc:productRelated')
props = {}
props['sc:isActive'] = True
props['sc:published'] = datetime.datetime(2007, 4, 1)
props['sc:product'] = 'SomePortal'
props['sc:version'] = '1.1'
doc.updateProperties(props)


Also, if you saw the webinar yesterday you know I showed some Python examples in the shell, but I then switched over to some OpenCMIS Java examples in Eclipse that I included in the custom content types tutorial. I didn’t want my fellow Pythonistas to feel neglected, so I ported those OpenCMIS examples to Python. Grab them here.

The examples assume you also have Patrice’s extension installed (my clone if you are using cmislib 0.5). If you don’t want to use Patrice’s extension for some reason, just comment out the “import cmislibalf” statement as well as the lines in the createTestDoc method that deal with aspects and aspect-defined properties. You should then be able to run the examples in straight cmislib.

If you don’t have cmislib you can install it by typing “easy_install cmislib”.

John Newton – Government Without Walls

Kane McLean – An Introduction to the Mil-OSS Community

Gunnar Hellekson – Open Source: A Platform for Government Innovation

Karen Stauffer – Zia Consulting and Athabasca University’s Alfresco ECM Project: A Case Study

Steve Davis -  Federalconference.com: Alfresco based Armedia Case Management Solution

Dr. David Prezant – Enterprise Content Management: New York City Fire Department

UPDATED on 1/26 to fix webinar link (thanks, Alessandro). See comments for a link to webinar recording and slides.

The code that accompanies the tutorial builds on the content types tutorial, so it includes the SomeCo content model and the user interface configuration needed to expose that to the Alfresco Share and Alfresco Explorer user interface.

This should be helpful to anyone who read the first edition who now wants to learn how to do the same thing using Alfresco Share, including some of the new extension points available in Alfresco 4.

Take a look and tell me what you think.

The fundamentals of content modeling haven’t changed since 2007, but since the original tutorial was posted the Alfresco Share web client has replaced Alfresco Explorer as the preferred user interface and the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) API has become the first choice for writing remote code against the repository. That, combined with the influx of newcomers to the platform and a continued demand for how-to’s on the basics motivated me to revise the tutorial.

The second edition moves the Alfresco Explorer configuration to the Appendix and replaces it with steps for doing the same thing in Alfresco Share. I also moved the Java Web Services API to the Appendix and replaced that with Java examples that leverage the Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS API to create, update, query, and delete content in the repository. I’m executing the same queries as the first edition, just implemented using CMIS, so if you want to compare Lucene queries to CMIS Query Language, this is one place to do it.

I tested the document and the code against Alfresco 4.0.c Community. It may work on earlier versions, but no promises. It will probably work on Alfresco 4.0 Enterprise when it becomes available.

My goal is to revise the rest of the Alfresco Developer Series tutorials for Alfresco 4 over the next month or two so stay tuned.

From time to time, Christy and I will get fed up and we’ll declare war on that stack of papers, spending an entire Sunday shredding and filing. Cleanup projects like this all start pretty much the same way:

1. Create a filing system you like
2. Make sure everything is filed
3. Go folder by folder, pruning content, merging folders, splitting out folders, etc.

The steps are simple, but each cleanup is time-consuming. In-between cleanups it’s tough to find things, although, curiously, Christy has an uncanny knack for finding last month’s cable bill within seconds, regardless of the pile it’s been put in.

The critical breakdown in the process, of course, is that we aren’t disciplined enough to file and prune as we go. Chalk it up to laziness, time constraints, and even the poor quality of the filing cabinet and the cramped physical layout of the office closet. Whatever the reason, it’s a bit of a mess.

My office closet is almost perfectly analogous to the Alfresco Wiki:

• There is good content in there if you know where to look.
• There is a lot of outdated content, some of which begs the question, “Why are we saving this?”.
• New pages get added with little thought to proper categorization.
• Newcomers to the community are often hard-pressed to find what they are looking for because the browsability sucks.

This last point is really important. We did a Community Survey earlier in the year that had a section on the wiki. The results indicated that most people can find what they are looking for. But multiple people came up to me during DevCon and mentioned how difficult the wiki is for newcomers and even offered to help. I think the reason for this may be that experts know what they are looking for but newcomers often don’t. Experts search (or already have their favorite pages bookmarked) while newcomers need a hierarchy to browse.

I believe that, in general, we could be doing a much better job getting new developers ramped up on the platform, and the wiki is a starting point for many of them, so getting the wiki in shape (and keeping it that way) is important, even if experts can already find what they are looking for.

In short, it’s time to do a cleanup. Now, unlike my domestic situation, where the maximum possible number of people who would help with the office closet cleanup job is 4 (and that’s wildly optimistic), the Alfresco community is thousands strong. I know not everyone in our community is interested or even good at cleaning up and curating the wiki. But several have volunteered. We’re calling them Alfresco Wiki Gardeners.

The goal is not to do a one-time cleanup and then ignore it until it gets messy again. We do have to clean up what’s there, of course, but I’m hoping that, as a community-owned, community-managed asset, the Alfresco Wiki Gardeners will take ownership of the wiki and provide consistent curation over time. What we need to help make that happen is:

• A group of people that care enough to spend time on it
• High-level guidelines and loose direction
• Channels for coordinating work
• Regular attention

So here’s what we’ve done so far:

• Formed the Alfresco Wiki Gardeners and had an initial meeting. We are using a Google Group to coordinate activities. We plan to meet online each month. We’re using chat to coordinate in-between meetings.
• Created a Wiki Guidelines page, linked to from the Wiki main page. The document explains what the wiki is, what it should contain, some guidelines for authors, and how to get involved.
• Categorized every category. We’ve moved from a flat list of categories to a hierarchy. The result is that we now have a pretty clean set of categories at the top level that is effectively our Table of Contents.
• Categorized every page. This is almost done. We want every page to live in at least one bucket. Starting today, if you create a page on the wiki and you don’t categorize it, it’s going to get categorized. If it defies categorization it’s going to get deleted.
• Drafted a set of “Special Categories”. These categories will be used to tag things like “Engineering Notes” or “Obsolete Pages” or pages that “Need to be Reviewed”.

Now we need to start cleaning up existing pages and some of the lower level categories. Obsolete content needs to be flagged, forward references to formal documentation on docs.alfresco.com need to be added. Some categories need to be combined or relocated.

I’m hoping that soon we’ll be able to identify major holes where new content is needed. I can already tell we need a ton of new content on Alfresco 4, particularly around Share Extensibility. We also need to spruce up the “Getting Started” category.

There is a lot of work to do. You can help. If you see a problem on a wiki page, log in and fix it. You don’t need to be a formal member of the Gardeners group to do that. But if you want to adopt a category or a topic area or commit to spending time regularly curating the Alfresco Wiki, you should join the Alfresco Wiki Gardeners group on Google so we can coordinate our efforts.

I hope this new team gets traction. I want to see a wiki we can be proud of instead of one we have to apologize for. Who’s with me?

I love helping people discover new games. I think many people limit their options to what they can find in big box retail stores, which is a shame. There is a whole world of great games out there if you just care enough to look. Fellow boardgamers, you local independent game store (if it still exists), and sites like Funagain Games are all great sources.

I recently asked my kids (ages 10 & 13) to name their top 10 favorite games in our game closet. I then picked my top 10 and compiled the results. Siblings being siblings, there were few clear winners. Here’s the list:

Pente & Pentago (3 votes). Pente was published in the late seventies/early eighties. It’s an abstract strategy game in which glass stones are placed on a grid. The object is to be the first player to place five stones in a row or to capture ten stones of the same color. It is reminiscent of Go but they are distant cousins, at best. For one thing, Pente games are much shorter. You can also play with multiple players. If you buy Pente, don’t settle for anything less than the edition that comes in a tube.

Pentago is very similar to Pente but it adds a literal twist: The grid is divided into rotating quadrants which a player twists 90 degrees at the end of their turn. Pentago also does away with captures.

Dominion (3 votes). Dominion is the newest addition to our game closet. The first couple of weeks we had it we were playing multiple games almost every night. This is a card game with a city-building metaphor. Your deck–your Dominion–starts as a modest collection of money and a few points, just like everyone else’s. Then, as the game progresses, you buy additional cards which help you improve your deck. Each turn, the hand you play is dealt from your deck, which is being continuously recycled. The goal is to acquire more points than anyone else by the end of the game. The trick is that you have to figure out the optimal way to leverage your resources to make that happen.

My Dad and my Uncle also enjoyed this game. They are consummate card counters, which can be a nice skill to have when playing this game–keeping track of the distribution of certain cards in your deck is extremely helpful.

Dominion comes with an enormous set of cards, each of which do different things. Any given game uses only a subset of these cards which means you can change up the game dynamics (and winning strategies) with every game.

Coloretto (2 votes). Coloretto is a deceptively simple card game in which you collect colors. Every turn you have a set of cards to choose from to add to your collection. The goal is to collect only the colors you intend to specialize in and collect none of the cards you don’t. Because of how the hands are played, you often get stuck with colors you don’t want (either by accident or because one of your opponents intentionally stuck you with an off color) which brings down your score. A nice attribute of this game is that it is compact and travels easily.

Spy Alley (2 votes). This is a boardgame in which you are a spy, traveling around gathering spy tools. The goal is to collect your full spy tool set and get to your country’s embassy before your opponents. The rub is that no one else knows which country you are spying for but they do see what kind of tools you are collecting. So the successful spy attempts to deceive the others by collecting tools for multiple countries. If someone guesses your country, you’re out. And that’s one thing I don’t like about this game, which is that the chance component is way too high. A random guess can take someone out fairly early in the game.

Hey, That’s My Fish! (2 votes). In this game a set of hexagonal tiles are arranged in any pattern. Each tile has one, two or three fish. Each player has a set of penguins. The number of penguins depends on how many people are playing. The objective is to pick up tiles and have the most fish by game end. Penguins can move from tile to tile, as many tiles as desired, as long as they travel in a straight line and do not jump gaps. Therein lies the trick–as you pick up tiles the board becomes more difficult to navigate, ultimately stranding penguins completely, ending the game.

Multiple Solitaire (2 votes). My sister and I used to play this with my Grandma non-stop. Games of double, triple, and quadruple solitaire are quite fun. As the name suggests, each player deals a standard Klondike soliatire setup. What makes it crazy is that everyone can play on each others’ aces. Speed is the winning aspect here and clear ground rules banning two-handed plays and body blocks are critical. There’s no limit to how many people can play. My Uncle once did a 40-person multiple solitaire game once that left both people and card decks bruised and battered.

Incan Gold (2 votes). Incan Gold is about risk/reward tradeoffs. In this game you are a traveler venturing into Incan temples in an attempt to snag treasure. The longer you stay in the temple, the more you can potentially earn, but the risk of losing everything is ever-increasing. Every turn you decide whether you are staying or going, as do your opponents. It’s fun to watch my kids’ very different strategies in this game. One methodically gathers a minimal amount of treasure and heads for the tent while the other presses his luck every single time.

Wits & Wagers (2 votes). Wits & Wagers is best for large groups. It’s a trivia game in which the answers are extremely difficult to guess. But the cool thing is that everyone takes a guess (answers are always either numbers or dates), the answers are organized across a frequency distribution, and then everyone bets on the one or two answers they think are closest without going over. The frequency distribution determines the odds with outliers earning higher odds. The winner has the most chips at the end of the game. For younger players, we do have to provide a little bit of assistance because they often lack enough context to make a guess that comes anywhere close to the answer.

Go (2 votes). Go has very few rules but is an extremely difficult game to master. I’m an extreme Go novice–I’ve been reading books on the game and play when I can. For the kids, I’ve read that it is best to simply explain the rules and let them play without trying to go overboard on teaching openings, patterns, and end-games, which is a good thing as I’m still learning those myself.

That’s it for the top ten. The following games got one vote each: Ticket to Ride, Blokus, Quoridor, Tripoly, and Carcassonne. That last one breaks my heart because Carcassonne is my all-time favorite game. I’m bummed my kids don’t want to play it more often.

Settlers of Catan, Spades, Set, Backgammon, Octiles, Rummikub, Chicken Foot, Sequence, and Pictionary got no votes as “favorites” even though we play those a fair amount. We play Pictionary enough that we covered a fair amount of the game room wall with whiteboard material.

So those are some of the favorites from my game closet. How about you? Got any good game recommendations?

So if you’ve ever needed to quickly find out all of the methods available to you in Alfresco.util or Alfresco.component.Base, for example, put down that recursive grep and head over to Share Extras.

Will’s taken JSDoc and added some tweaks to make it more YUI aware. So if you’re following Alfresco’s pattern of comments in your own client-side JavaScript code, you can use the toolkit to generate doc specific to your project. Will explains how this works on his JSDoc wiki page.

We tried a lot of new things at DevCon last week. I thought I’d re-cap what worked well here:

Purposeful lunches. DevCon was two days. On Day 1, we assigned a technical topic to each lunch table and then made sure an Engineer was at each table to cover that topic. Attendees sorted themselves to the table they were interested in discussing over lunch. Some tables really worked their topic over thoroughly during lunch. Others used it as an icebreaker and then moved on to other stuff. On Day 2 we divided the tables up by geography and industry vertical. Most people I talked to liked the concept.

Engineering Office Hours. The concept is a repeat from our first DevCon, but this year we had a bulletin board with each Engineer, their bio, their picture, and a sign-up sheet. Attendees grabbed a slot, then met with their Engineer. This worked out really well. For London we’ll pre-print the time slots rather than have them be freeform.

Panel Discussion. Last year at DevCon in New York, the panel discussion was a little ad hoc. This year we put the panel discussion on the morning of the second day as a general session and that seemed to work. For London, we’re moving the panel discussion to the end of the second day so any questions that the day 2 sessions raise can be asked at that time. It should also give us a nice opportunity to recap the conference.

Alfresco Community Pledges. DevCon serves a lot of purposes. One is to energize and motivate people to get involved with the Alfresco community. I had some extra Alfresco “attitude” t-shirts so I decided to give them to people who would pledge to make some contribution to the community in the coming weeks and months. Here are some that we got via twitter.

@dev_kraig Kraig Van Houten
@Alfresco I #pledge to write one #alfresco related blog post per month

@SunilRehman Sunil Rehman
@Alfresco I #pledge to report 5 new #Alfresco 4.0 b bugs before thanksgiving

@WillWhite18 Will White
I #pledge to report at least 5 bugs in #Alfresco 4.0b before thanksgiving.

@Michaelcford Michael C Ford
@Alfresco I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum post in the next 3 weeks

@emmichie Eric Michie
I #pledge to host an #Alfresco meetup in my area twice this quarter. Salt Lake City Utah

@tenthline_ecm Tenthline
@tenthline_ecm will #pledge to host #Alfresco meetup in #Toronto twice this quarter.

@aaronaheath Aaron Heath
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month for the next 12 months. I will also become more active on the #Alfresco forum.

@perejnar Per Ejnar Thomsen
I #pledge to report 5 new (legitimate) #Alfresco 4.0b bugs before Thanksgiving

@dstaflund Darryl Stafflund
I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum posts in the next three Weeks.

@iancrew Ian Crew
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

@trisofer Chris Paul
@jeffpotts01 I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

It was great to see these and to talk to people between sessions who said the conference was the kick in the pants they needed to get going again with their contributions.

Thanks to everyone who attended, sponsored, or spoke at DevCon San Diego. It exceeded my expectations and hopefully yours as well. I’ll report back here after London and we’ll see if these ideas were just as successful for that event.