Hopefully you saw that Alfresco 5.0.a Community Edition was released last week. Kevin Roast did a nice write-up on a few of the new features. I created a screencast based on his write-up. It is embedded below or use this link.
You might want to make the video full-screen and take the settings up to HD.
If you take a peek under the covers you’ll likely see that there are still some deprecated chunks of code hanging around, libraries that still need to be upgraded, and features you might have expected but that aren’t yet implemented. This is still an early release. You should expect several more named releases before Community Edition 5.0 stabilizes.
Use this release as a preview for what’s coming, to test your own add-ons, or to help find and report issues. If you are running Community Edition in production I’d stick with 4.2.f for now.
Alfresco 4 Community was released last week. There’s a nice presentation on slideshare that summarizes what’s new in Alfresco 4, so I’m not going to give a comprehensive list here. And we’re going to be covering the technical details on all of the new features at DevCon in San Diego and London so I’ll save the code snippets for DevCon.
Next week, people all over the world will be celebrating the Alfresco 4 release with informal meetups so I thought in this post I’d prime the pump a bit with a brief list of the more buzz-worthy features and record some short screencasts of those so that if you aren’t able to join one of the worldwide release parties, you can have your own little soiree at your home or office. Just try not to let it get out of control. If the cops do show up, you might mention that the New York Police Department uses Alfresco.
Drag-and-Drop
I’ve been showing Alfresco 4 at JavaOne all week and drag-and-drop was pretty popular. You can drag one or more files from your machine into the repo. And you can move them from one folder to another by dropping onto the folder hierarchy. You’ll need an HTML5-enabled browser for this to work. Here it is in action (this one didn’t get created in HD for some reason):
Document Library In-Line Edit
It’s a little thing, but it’s handy. You can change file names and add tags from the document list without launching the edit metadata panel.
Configurable Document Library Sort Order & Better Site Config
How many times has a customer asked you to change the document library sort order? I know, I know. Now they can do it themselves. Also, you can now brand sites individually, so each site can have its own theme. And components can be renamed to things like your document library don’t have to be called “Document Library”.
Better Administration
The Share Administration panel now has a Node Browser, a Category Manager, and a Tag Manager. The Node Browser and the Category Manager were actually direct community contributions. Tell me again why you are still using the old Alfresco Explorer client?
DM to File System Publish
Last year at DevCon in New York, a bunch of us tackled Brian Remmington, wrestled him to the ground, and refused to let him up until he agreed to add this to the product. Once security was able to break up the scrum we apologized and had a good talk. I think deep down he appreciated our passion. I’m joking, of course, but what’s not a joke is that the DM-to-file system publish functionality is now in there. I’ll update this post with a screencast as soon as I figure out how it works.
So take a look at the presentation for a more complete summary. I didn’t show Activiti or Solr, which are two much-anticipated additions to the product, because the value they add is hard to convey in a short screencast. Feel free to record your own screencasts of your favorite new features and point me to them.
I recorded a quick screencast of a simple integration we did to show Open Atrium leveraging Alfresco as a formal document repository via CMIS. This leverages the CMIS Alfresco module we developed and released on Drupal.org.
As I point out in the screencast, there’s not much to the integration from a technical standpoint. Open Atrium is Drupal and the CMIS module already has a CMIS repository browser. So, all we had to do was expose the module as a “feature”, which is something Open Atrium uses to bundle modules together that create a given chunk of functionality.
Readers familiar with Alfresco Share will instantly recognize the Open Atrium concepts. Instead of “sites” Atrium uses “groups”. Instead of “pages” or “tools”, Atrium uses “features”. The overall purpose, self-provisioned team-based collaboration, is the same and many of the tools/features are the same (blog, calendar, member directory). I’m not advocating using one over the other–as usual, what works best for you depends on a lot of factors. I just thought Atrium provided a nice way to show yet another example of Drupal and Alfresco together (post).
At Optaros, we see Django and Alfresco as a powerful combination for building content-centric applications. The integration shown in the screencast is based on work we did for our friends at Neiman Marcus. An open source version of this integration will be available within a week or so.
I’ve created a new screencast that shows the Alfresco-Drupal CMIS integration in action over at Optaros Labs. The screencast shows content moving back-and-forth between Alfresco and Drupal, content being displayed in a Drupal site that lives in Alfresco, and a CMIS CQL query being executed against the Alfresco repository from Drupal.
My colleague, John Eckman, has posted the second part of the Alfresco Share screencast at Optaros Labs. In this screencast I show how a couple of examples of custom share components. One is a team bookmarks component and the other is a status/microblogging component. These components were built with Surf and should work in any Surf-based web site. Obviously, that includes Share but could be other Surf sites that you build. We will make both components available as open source.
