topic Re: Feasibility of Tweaking Alfresco Community Edition for specialized requirements? in Alfresco Forum

Feasibility of Tweaking Alfresco Community Edition for specialized requirements?

vkaustubh — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 06:48:44 GMT

Greetings!Let me first congratulate all the developers of the Alfresco Community Edition for making such a great tool. We have been searching for a tool to manage our data in a centralized and consistent manner. But we need a very specialized tool in that we need the tool to be able to enforce sever

Re: Feasibility of Tweaking Alfresco Community Edition for specialized requirements?

afaust — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 20:39:22 GMT

All your requirements are generally feasible. For most of them, you'd only need a modest level of customisation. E.g. removing the "ownership" privilege to restrict deletion is something I do in almost every customer project with a simple policy / behaviour within a few minutes. Handling state-based locking / protection can be handled either by policies / behaviours as well, as part of a content process or just by providing the specific user actions in the UI to lock a document. There already are two modes of locking provided via APIs - a simple lock or a lock with "working copy" for handling longer term editing. "Forking" a site can be as simple as copying its contents into a new site, and taking care to also copy any version histories.

Site linkages are not something that is done often, but addons exist (disclaimer: this is an addon I did for a customer to have departmental sites contain their specific project sites).

Where I see a bit of a question mark is the lack of Java experience. With the newest ReST API you can do a lot with external tooling in whatever language you like, but most of the features listed sound more like extension / additions around the default UI / product (Share), which typically requires Java, JavaScript and FreeMarker - Java especially when we are talking about inherent, transactionally consistent system policies / behaviours.

Re: Feasibility of Tweaking Alfresco Community Edition for specialized requirements?

vkaustubh — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 04:59:43 GMT

Dear Axel,

Thank you so much for taking the time out to answer my queries. In my first attempt to understand the API and the organization of the Alfresco code, I ended up going around in circles and got confused. That led me to ask this question in the forums.

I don't think adjusting to Java should be a major problem for us. We will give it a try. Not to bother you too much but if you have some advice about the best path to follow to get to understanding UI customization better, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks so much for your help again.

Re: Feasibility of Tweaking Alfresco Community Edition for specialized requirements?

vkaustubh — Fri, 25 May 2018 07:52:13 GMT

Dear Axel,

Would it be possible for a site to have multiple parents in case of your Alfresco extension for site hierarchy? If not, would it be easy to modify it to support this?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Feasibility of Tweaking Alfresco Community Edition for specialized requirements?

afaust — Fri, 25 May 2018 11:36:18 GMT

In the current state of the site hierarchy addon, a site can only have one parent. As it is intended as a top-down tree. But it would be possible to support multiple parents by changing the association multiplicity, adapting the service validation and UI selection.

Re: Feasibility of Tweaking Alfresco Community Edition for specialized requirements?

vkaustubh — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 04:52:24 GMT

Thanks for the response.