Tag: How To

Updated tutorial: Implementing Custom Behaviors in Alfresco

I have published a major revision to my Implementing Custom Behaviors in Alfresco tutorial. I hadn’t really touched it since 2007–behaviors, the ability to bind programming logic to types, aspects, and events in Alfresco, haven’t changed at all since then.

The changes are mainly around using the Alfresco Maven SDK to produce AMPs and the addition of unit tests to the project. I also gave it a bit of a style scrub to make it more consistent with other tutorials.

The tutorial continues with the SomeCo example. In this tutorial you will create the content model and behavior needed to implement the back-end for SomeCo’s five star rating functionality. By the end of this tutorial you will know:

  • What a behavior is
  • How to bind a behavior to specific policies such as onCreateNode and onDeleteNode
  • How to write behaviors in Java as well as server-side JavaScript
  • How to write a unit test that tests your behavior

This tutorial, the source code that accompanies it, and the rest of the tutorials in the Alfresco Developer Series reside on GitHub. If you want to help with improvements, fork the project and send me a pull request.

Next week I hope to publish a major revision of the Introduction to Web Scripts tutorial.

Alfresco Developer Series tutorial source code now on github

The source code for the tutorials in my Alfresco Developer Series has always been available to download as a zip. But for some reason I never put it in a project where we could collaborate on it. That’s fixed now. The code’s now on github. (Note that the source code that accompanies the Alfresco Developer Guide is on Google Code. I don’t intend to maintain that going forward and will instead focus on these github projects).

As part of that I’ve made sure that the content types, behaviors, actions, web scripts, and workflow tutorial code works on 4.0.d and 4.2.c. The original zips referenced in the tutorial PDF still work with the versions they were written for, of course, but if you grab the source from github, they’ll work on the version they are tagged for.

One thing I’ve realized as part of this is that with the actual tutorials in PDF, keeping the written instructions in sync with the code is tough. Maybe I should convert the tutorial text into markdown or something similar and check that into the source code repo as well. Let me know what you think about that idea.

Next step for the code is to convert from the old Ant-based Alfresco SDK to the new Maven-based SDK.

End-User How-To Videos for Alfresco Community Edition

I’ve started creating some how-to videos for performing common end-user tasks on Alfresco Community Edition. You can get to them all on this YouTube Playlist or take a look at the ones created so far, below…

The playlist currently includes:

  • Reviewing the sample site
  • Adding users (one at-a-time and by importing a CSV)
  • Creating groups
  • Create a new site
  • Five ways to create content
  • Versioning a document
  • Starting a workflow
  • Updating your profile
  • Exploring social features
  • Configuring user and site dashboards
  • Adding new features to your site

In the very near future I’d like to add some technical how-to’s for Community Edition, including LDAP configuration, CIFS/WebDAV/FTP/IMAP configuration, installing the SharePoint Protocol, installing the Google Docs Integration, configuring inbound and outbound SMTP, basic content model extensions, and basic dashlet development.

If you have ideas for Alfresco Community Edition videos you’d like to see that would help make your Alfresco Community Edition rollout more successful, let me know.