Month: March 2015

March 6, 2015

Quick Hack: Restricting Create Site Links to a Site Creators Group

At Alfresco Summit 2014 there was a wonderful session from Angel Borroy called, “10 Enhancements That Require Less Than 10 Lines of Code“. If you missed it you should follow that link and watch the recording.

Angel said the talk was inspired by my blog post about an example add-on I created that allows you to define default folder structures that get populated in the document library when you create a new site (see share-site-space-templates on GitHub).

One of the other 9 enhancements Angel showed was how to hide the “Create Site” link. I’ve seen so many of my clients and people in the forums asking for this functionality, I decided to enhance it a little bit, put it in an AMP, and make it available on GitHub. You can download share-site-creators and try it out for yourself.

Here’s a little more about how it works…

Instead of hiding the “Create Site” link from everyone but administrators, my add-on allows you to create a group that is used to determine who can create sites. The group, appropriately enough, is called “Site Creators”. If you aren’t in that group, you won’t see the “Create Site” link in any of these places:

The Sites menu
The “My Sites” Dashlet
The “Welcome” dashlet

Additionally, the add-on changes the underlying permissions at the repository tier so that if your teammates are hackers, they cannot circumvent the user interface and create their sites using other means.

The screenshot below (click to enlarge) shows what it looks like when you aren’t a member of the Site Creators group:

You might notice that the text of the “Sharing” column in the welcome dashlet also changes to be more applicable to someone who cannot create their own sites.

The new text is in a properties file. Currently I have only an English version, so if any of my multi-lingual friends want to translate the new string, that might be useful to others.

Just like my Share Site Space Templates add-on, this one is not mind-blowing. But it is useful, both in terms of functionality, and as an example of how to override Alfresco Share web scripts without copying-and-pasting tons of code.

I’ve tested this with Alfresco 4.2.f Community Edition. If you want to get it working with other versions, or you have other improvements, bring on the pull requests!

March 5, 2015

Richard Esplin steps down as Head of Alfresco Community Relations

Things continue to be in flux at Alfresco with regards to how they manage their community. Today, Richard Esplin announced that he is stepping down as Head of Alfresco Community Relations to become a Product Manager for Alfresco Community Edition. In his blog post, Richard says that although his title changed a while back, his day-to-day job has still been mostly focused on the community, until now.

It sounds like rather than having a centralized team focused on managing the community, the various community touch points will be diffused throughout the organization.

Last month, Alfresco hired long-time community member, author, and former Ixxus employee, Martin Bergljung. I know through the grapevine there are more community hires on the way. These seem to be focused on “developer outreach” and “developer ecosystem” which is one aspect of community management.

I hope the “community is everyone’s job” approach does not lead to a “community is no one’s job” problem at Alfresco.

Related to Community Edition, Richard said, “I will be rethinking our approach to Alfresco Community Edition in order to make it a better product for its target audience”. My worry here is that there hasn’t always been agreement on what is the “target audience” for Alfresco Community Edition. In the past, Alfresco Software, Inc. has wanted the target audience to be developers who experiment and test out code that will ultimately become Enterprise Edition. The reality has been that many people want to run Community Edition in production–they want a high quality, free/libre open source software product that helps them solve document management problems.

Hopefully, Richard and the rest of the Alfresco team are aligned to the new reality of how Community Edition is being used.

It will definitely be interesting to see how these staffing shifts work out for the community.

March 1, 2015

Book Review: Learning Alfresco Web Scripts

Packt Publishing recently sent me a copy of Learning Alfresco Web Scripts by Ramesh Chauhan to review in exchange for my thoughts on the book which I’ll share with you now…

Web Scripts are an essential part of Alfresco. If you are extending or customizing the platform and you have time to learn only one thing about it, web scripts might very well be that thing. The reason is that they are key to so much else you might want to do such as integrating Alfresco with a third party system or customizing Alfresco Share, which is, at its core, comprised of web scripts.

Most technical books on Alfresco give some attention to web scripts, but this one dives into the details. After reading it, you’ll know how to do simple things with web scripts and you’ll have some idea of how to do more complex work beyond understanding the Model-View-Controller basics.

While the comprehensiveness is a good thing, I think it also presents a bit of a challenge which comes down to this: Who is this book for? If it is for beginners, it needs a lot more examples and could cut back on a lot of the technical detail. If it is for experts, point to existing sources for the basics and drill deeper on the interesting technical topics.

I did see a couple of bad practices in the book. First, in the chapter on Java-backed web scripts (Ch. 6) the author provides an example Spring configuration XML file that injects the lower-cased Alfresco beans into the web script class. This may sound like a trivial nitpick, but it’s actually a big no-no that I see repeatedly. If you have good reason for using the unsecured, internal-only, lower-cased beans, explain it. Otherwise, stick to the public, secured, upper-cased beans so that beginners don’t pick up a bad habit.

Similarly, there is a part that discusses where web script files can live in the Alfresco WAR. The author does point out that the extension directory is “preferred” but I don’t think this is worded strongly enough. Those other locations should have been left out entirely or maybe it could have said, “Place your files only in the extension directory. While these other locations may technically work, you should never use them.”

I was happy to see the chapter on the Maven SDK and the discussion of AMPs. And I think putting the Eclipse details later was a good idea, as one of the features of web scripts is that you don’t have to use Java or an IDE of any kind if you don’t want to. The book doesn’t cover Surf, Aikau, or Share customization in any detail, and I think that was also a good decision as those areas are too fluid at the moment and because the singular focus on web scripts is one of the book’s assets.

Overall, Learning Alfresco Web Scripts is a very thorough and comprehensive treatment of an important technical topic for Alfresco developers.