topic Re: Some observations in Alfresco Archive

Some observations

smcardle — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 22:04:18 GMT

Hi All.I have been doing some customisations to the Share 4.1 interface so that various pages of Share are able to be included in iframes my customers application.1. The first thing was to hide the header and footer on every page : This went well using the module extension mechanism and as both comp

Re: Some observations

ddraper — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:45:58 GMT

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the feedback - it's very much appreciated. It's worth bearing in mind the historical context when considering customizations… when Share was originally written it wasn't done with consideration to the customizations that are now possible through the module extension mechanism (in fact we had to retrofit this capability into Surf to make it possible). That said, your points are valid - we do need to continue to make it easier to customize Share and use-cases such as those that you've provided are very helpful to us.

We are looking at lots of ways in which we can address these sorts of issue in future releases, but its unlikely the specific changes that you're suggesting will make it into a service pack - your best bet is to raise improvement tickets in JIRA and hope they get prioritized. Hopefully some of the changes that are going into the main community source branch will begin to help make some of the customizations that you wish to make easier (by providing the ability to more easily extend the client-side JavaScript widgets and make more fine-grained changed). We'll also hopefully be making further improvements further down the line so that even this isn't a necessary step.

With regards to you concern over breadcrumbs … if they were not placed within the context of the Document List then I would probably agree with you (i.e. if they were in the title bar say)… but they are breadcrumbs in the context of the repository view that you are browsing (in fact they are more like a path location than breadcrumbs).

Regards,
Dave

Re: Some observations

smcardle — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:17:59 GMT

Thanks Dave

I completely agree that the breadcrumbs are implemented more in the context of a path to the currently displayed repository location rather than real breadcrumbs. Anyway, we intend to make some changes here to enable real breadcrumb functionality as it's pretty much a requirement in our use cases at the moment, and I'll be happy to contribute this back to the code base or as an extention module when finished.

The other issues are more in the "it's annoying" catagory and I expect we'll need to address these as well, possibly sooner than later, again to meet our user requirements. I suspect we'll gloss over these issues in the short term until they become more of a priority once the users start to complain or raise issues with the functionality.

None of this is in anyway a critisism of Share, we're big fans of Alfresco and we would like to get more involved with the future modualisation efforts going forward.

We have some BIG plans for Share customisations that we're working on and will mostly try to approach these using AOP rather than code changes if custom modules can not do the job in the short term. One such product we're working on is a Drop Box replacement called eDrive which uses the Novel iFolder clients as front ends and transforms the SOAP calls into CMIS web service calls so we can use Alfresco as the content store instead of the Novel Enterprise Servers. This will be a core touch point for our "Office Assistant" product and will provide features we are unable to realise using Drop Box or Google Drive.

What we will probably do in the future is raise JIRA tickets and provide Aspects that meet out needs, or use cases, then hopefully you guys will change the code base in future releases and we can remove our Aspects

Regards

Steve

Re: Some observations

andy2_0 — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 15:02:34 GMT

This is very useful… thanks for contribution!