wabson on alfresco

It’s official: After years of dithering, Sun is releasing Java SE and Java ME under the GPLv2. Not their own CDDL, not the MPL, but the GNU General Public License itself with all of it’s copyleft provisions. ZDNet UK have a good initial article on their move, which as they point out in particularly interesting in light of Novell’s recent pact with the devil.

Which means that in addition to being 100% open source itself, Alfresco can now run on a completely open source stack: Linux, Java and your open source RMDBS of choice. Hopefully this will make the whole process of installing on Linux a lot easier and will open a lot more doors, particularly in the public sector where increasingly using open source and open standards is a requirement. Today is a good day.

Jeff Waugh on how Ubuntu got it’s name and avoided getting named after that funny station at the wrong end of the Picadilly Line.

Incidentally, Dapper rocks! It seems the team have really used the extra six week period at the end of the development cycle to really add a lot of polish to the OS. Whoever thought brown could be so preeety?

I’ve made more progress on the web content templating in Alfresco this week. I’ve really gotta think of a better name for it than that, but I’m dubious about dubbing it web content management as it’s missing quite a lot from the set of WCM functionality that’s coming to Alfresco later this year.

Anyway, the templates now support full previewing of content from within the application, just by applying a special web page template to a space. Here’s some screenshots of this in action:

This is the top level web content space, so the various sub-spaces simply mirror the UNIX directory structure of our current production site. So, each page is represented by a space and the individual files within each space are then used to build up the content of the page. If you really wanna know the details:

• page.properties contains various metadata about the page, like its name (used in the navigation elements), title and meta tag information
• site.properties is a special file that exists only in the top level of the site and - logically enough - contains information about the site itself, like it’s URL and the default templates to be used
• Here front_content.html contains the main content of the page, which is everything except the page header, navigation and footer elements. In other pages the files main_content.html and right_content.html are used together to form a two-column layout

From here, you can select View Details from the More Actions menu to bring up the details screen.

The best thing about this preview is that you can click around within the page and load up other pages straight from Alfresco. This takes all hyperlinks, images and other such stuff that it finds in the page content and points them back into Alfresco, via the template or download servlets - true WYSIWYG previewing!

There’s a few things still to do before the system’s fully production-ready.

• Integrating the news template that displays the x-most-recent items on our press releases page
• Building a template that parses an iCal file on the server and displays a list containing our forthcoming events
• Making a template that performs a Lucene search on the web content and displays a list of matching pages

Other things that would be useful:

• Have an alternative ‘Print this page’ template available
• Make the revision history of each page available via a web page or an RSS feed
• Support logging in to the site, and having restricted content magically become available!

Soon enough, we’ll be 100% powered by Alfresco

One of the most eagerly anticipated features soon to be part of Alfresco it would seem, is our web content management capabilities. This functionality isn’t just something that our customers are asking for, it’s something that we desperately need internally too.

Our two sites at www.alfresco.com and dev.alfresco.com currently run on an Apache/PHP server, which despite being nice open source software is a pain to keep up-to-date. Who wants to install a complete development environment and trudge their way through sections of PHP code just so they can add a news item to the site?

Well now we don’t have to. By combining the power of Alfresco’s forthcoming 1.3 release with the flexibility of the Freemarker templating engine we have a robust platform for WCM that we can use to store our web content securely, yet in a manner that drastically cuts down the time to make changes. Automatic versioning, access via CIFS, FTP, WebDAV and the web client - we’ve got it all.

It’s taken about a week’s worth of hacking to get an initial version of this up and running, most of that time having been spent building up Freemarker templates, but with some additional work to code a PHP proxy that recieves requests for freiendly URLs and feeds this request through to Alfresco, which generates the complete markup. Now try doing that with your average proprietary CMS. No? I thought not :-).

I spent some time today experimenting with Mozilla’s Sunbird calendaring app, trying to build up a comprehensive list of all the events going on within Alfresco. There’s a lot of stuff going on here at the moment but we don’t yet have a single place on our site where you can get a comprehensive summary of all these cool events.

So the solution? Publish an iCal file to the web site that people can subscribe to using their client of choice that will keep them informed about what’s going on.

Sunbird makes it dead easy to create the iCal file and add events to it, but publishing this to the site via FTP is messy and limits the subset of people who can contribute to the calendar to those people with FTP details for the site. Not so good.

So I stored the calendar file in Alfresco instead. Now anyone with write access on that file can contribute, and Sunbird can even update the calendar directly using the fabulous WevDAV support built into Alfresco.

You can download the calendar or if you’re a fellow-Alfrescan with an account on customers.alfresco.com then you can subscribe to it in Sunbird or the calendaring extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird. iCal might well work with it too, but I don’t have a Mac to test this on.

All in all, a pretty good example of what you can achieve in a couple of hours using open source software and open standards like iCal and WebDAV :-).

Hot off the press is our latest podcast, featuring Dave Caruana talking to our Chief Marketing Officer Ian Howells about Alfresco’s support for the standard. Dave is Alfresco’s Chief Scientist and is a member of the JSR-283 committee.

It’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. Since then, we’ve launched Alfresco Blogs and it’s podcast-touting sibling Open Source Talk.

Meanwhile over in California, Esther Dyson has some dangerous ideas about the future of email. Trying to be pragmatic about the whole pay-to-send email debate and not subscribing to the idealist kind of beliefs that Esther claims everyone against the idea holds, I still find it difficult to believe how such a scheme could actually work.

Email systems are already complex enough, without adding another layer of complexity into the mix. We now have server blacklists, spam filters and sender authentication schemes bolted on top of the original SMTP standards but the only technology that’s made a difference to me lately has been Google’s Gmail service.

Just like they did in the search field, Google have done some really innovative stuff with email and the results are amazing. Now I rarely ever see a spam message in my inbox even though around half of the messages coming into the account are junk.

So perhaps if AOL and their like put some effort into making progress like this, rather than demanding money off people who mostly have no interest in paying for something they’ve had for free for years then we might make some progress here

Matt - working in a small company is new to me too. or at least it was two months ago. Now it’s just that daily routine of getting as much stuff done in a day as you can that I have to deal with.

This week the big event was undoubtedly yesterday’s web seminar with MySQL. I spent a lot of time working on the web infrastructure for this, and the effort I’ve put in will hopefully mean we’ll be able to deploy similar resources more readily in the future. Now that we have a proper place for white papers and for newletter sign-ups, it’s just a simple matter of linking this into the existing content we already have on the site.

I’d also like to welcome Chenoa and Villmond Luxembourg SARL as officially-listed partners on our site, which sees the total list rise to 19 partner organisations. It’s not me who’s put in the hard work in bringing these guys on board, but it’s nice to be part of the process that gets this news out to the world.

When I think back to the second I first read about Alfresco some five months ago (and on the other side of the globe, to boot) I was convinced that this company was going places. This week has done more than any other to cement this in my mind. And yeah, there’s a lot of work to be done to realise this, but I guess at least it’s better than being bored :-).

Catching up on blogs seems to be all I’ve had time to do lately with the hecticness of work being as it is at the moment, but now I’ve discovered a way of absorbing the latest open source goings on while I get on with other things!

Mirroring what we’re working to get off the ground at Alfresco at the moment, Novell recently launched Novell Open Audio to the world. I gave it a listen to last night mainly to see what kind of stuff they were doing in their podcasts, and ended up listening intently to the guys talking about iFolder and the collaboration features that they’ve built on top of the stack with the latest 3.0 release. Very interesting stuff indeed, and quite a lot of potential cross-over with the colloboration stuff that we have in Alfresco.

Also interesting is how they’ve now split off a community version of iFolder (complete with the compulsory shiny-MediaWiki-for-a-website thing just like F-Spot, Banshee and Mono - clearly a great way of getting content up on your site) from the enterprise offering and how they’ve split their people between those two areas.

I didn’t get round to listening to the second half of the 50 minute show about NLD, but I’ll make sure I do when I get a chance. Truly engaging stuff - we’ve got a lot to live up to!

Apparently the fantasticness of Gmail is soon to be available for business use, with Google now piloting the service within San Jose City College in San Jose, California. They’re also accepting registrations from other organisations interested in taking part, via the original blog post. (How scary does the “Google Blog” sound?)

This kind of service that offers a real compelling alternative to the hosted Outlook type of service that we use for email at Alfresco at the moment. With 2GB of storage per user and the power of Google’s search technology, this is going to turn the market on it’s head.