Gavin Cornwell

Up until 1.3 customizing the web client has involved editing our JSP files and in some cases our backing bean implementations. This prevents the upgrade process from being an easy pain free one!

A majority of the screens in web client can be categorized as either dialogs or wizards. In 1.3 we are therefore introducing a configuration driven dialog and wizard framework. This means that eventually more or less every page in the application could be switched for a custom implementation using the overriding features of our config service. Likewise, any page in a wizard could be switched or new pages added in a simple manner.

Unfortunately, to get this flexibility some incompatible changes are being made that will result in some manual migration effort if changes have been made to any of our backing bean classes.

We’re in the process of writing the documentation for the new framework so keep checking the wiki for updates.

To help us help you we would like to get some feedback on the types of customizations you have performed on Alfresco, this will help us channel our energy into the right migration documentation and to guage which areas of the application to make easier to customize sooner rather than later (we may not get time to convert everything in the 1.3 timeframe).

If you live on the ‘bleeding edge’, SVN has the first version of the dialog and wizard framework checked in, the Advanced Space Wizard and Create Space Dialog have also been converted to the new way of doing things.

We’d love to hear your feedback either as comments to this blog entry or preferably on the forums.