We hosted a good crowd of folks at Optaros headquarters in Boston today for our second Code Camp around Alfresco 3.0 Surf. Alfresco’s own Dr. Yong Qu was on hand to provide an early gift to campers–a live demo of Alfresco’s browser-based site designer tool, Web Studio. It looked like it was coming along nicely. The new tool is in Labs head but I haven’t had a chance to take a look so it was great that Yong was able to show us how it worked.

Yong showed a quick demo in which he stepped through a site creation wizard. Behind the scenes, Web Studio was creating a new web project in the Alfresco WCM store and configuring a user sandbox. Once the site was created, Yong put the site in edit mode. It makes more sense when you see it but what happens is a tray opens up that contains various lists of templates, components, and assets that can be dragged-and-dropped onto regions on the site’s pages. Once put in place, the component can be configured. Again, behind the scenes, Web Studio is creating the Surf model objects in the Alfresco WCM store (Code Campers become painfully aware of the variety and number of model objects required to build a Surf site because they do it by hand all day in the labs).

It’ll be a while (multiple months?) before Web Studio makes it into Enterprise. Until then, try it out. And while you’re in there, look at the library of components. Alfresco is hoping you will be inspired to create and submit additional components that can be similarly shared with the community.

The next Optaros-led Alfresco 3.0 Surf Code Camp will be in Munich on January 13th. I’ll be there as well as some of my other Optaros teammates, Alfresco will be there, and we’re hoping you will be there too. Read more details on the Munich event and sign up here.