One of the best things a community can do for its members is to make it easy for newcomers to get started. In the Alfresco community, we’ve made some improvements rather recently such as:

• re-platforming forums.alfresco.com so that we could reduce spam and add new features;
• adding a list of getting started resources to the installer;
• revising the Alfresco Developer Series tutorials for the latest Alfresco release;
• creating how-to videos for Community Edition;
• consolidating a number of developer-centric blogs into a single Alfresco Developers blog; and
• starting a new regular live Google Hangout called Office Hours where people can get their questions answered.

Those all help people get pointed in the right direction. Now it is time to focus on the specific tools people use to write code for their Alfresco projects.

When someone wants to customize or extend Alfresco they often start with the downloadable SDK. The downloadable SDK includes dependencies (Alfresco & third-party), source for Alfresco dependencies, JavaDoc, and sample projects.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the downloadable SDK. It has existed in pretty much the same state since it was originally created and has served us well. But there are newer tools available. For example, thanks to the hard work of Gab Columbro and some of his cohorts, there is now a set of officially-supported artifacts for both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. That means you can use a tool like Maven to resolve dependencies for you. There are also Maven archetypes that make it easy for you to start a new Alfresco project with the appropriate folder structure for the type of customization you need to do, complete with a ready-to-import Eclipse project.

So all of this great work has been done on the Maven-based SDK but the “last mile” is making it easily consumable by brand new developers. The best way to do that, I think, is to refactor and revitalize the downloadable SDK. I think we need to:

• Remove old sample projects that are no longer relevant
• Add new sample projects for areas of the platform that may currently be missing
• Convert all sample projects to builds that leverage the Alfresco Maven SDK
• Provide a light set of documentation that explains how to use the Alfresco Maven SDK and how to build the sample projects. This should not replace any formal official documentation on customizing Alfresco. Instead, it should be just enough to understand what’s in the SDK, how to build and run the samples, and how to use the Alfresco Maven SDK to start a new project.

Toward this end, I’ve grabbed the Alfresco SDK source out of Alfresco SVN and used it to create an Alfresco SDK project on Github. If the community leaves it up to me, I’ll work on it in fits and starts as I am able and it will get done in a few years. Instead, I’m hoping that a few of you who are excited about this idea will fork the project and start giving me pull requests. We can discuss this effort in #alfresco on freenode IRC. If enough people are interested we could also have a regular Skype call to coordinate efforts.

Thanks ahead of time for any time you are able to put in to this project. I’m hoping that if we work together we can get this looking great by Alfresco Summit, but that depends on you!