Alfresco for normal Web Site Development?

[coolwombat]

Hi,

New to Alfresco, maybe a stupid question. Can Alfreso be used to create a normal web site? If yes, how easy is it, do you have to be a programmer to be able to work with Alfresco?

Thanks Malcolm

[kevinr]

Please see this post:
http://www.alfresco.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=4014

You need to be a developer who has had some exposure to Java and also preferably J2EE and/or Java web technologies to develop against Alfresco.

Any user who has used a web browser or other document management system should be able to use the Alfresco web-client application

Thanks,

Kevin

[kvc]

Hi,

New to Alfresco, maybe a stupid question. Can Alfreso be used to create a normal web site? If yes, how easy is it, do you have to be a programmer to be able to work with Alfresco?

Thanks Malcolm

A couple of answers here:


1.  Today, Alfresco serves as a repository of content for any website/
     web application.  Alfresco can be used to manage all your business
     documents and transform them in web-ready formats (HTML, PDF)
     and categorize them linking into overall site navigation and index
     pages.  Alfresco can also be used to capture HTML pages using
     an included WYSIWYG editor.  All of this is easily configured by
     an end-user in the Alfresco web app and does not require a
     programmer.

     Now, the website/application itself *does* need to get built by
     a programmer.  Because Alfresco is a standard JCR (Java Content
     Repository - basically a next generation CMS that supports JSR170
     Levels I and II), programmers can readily build web pages that
     call to Alfresco to retrieve content and render on a web page. 
     To make this even easier for web developers building a web app
     that runs on multiple front-end load-balanced servers against a
     single database server with the content repository, Alfresco provides
     a web services interface.  Good just gets better.

2.  Moving forward, Alfresco will also be providing you tools for an
     end user to create and customize entirely new websites/applications
     without having to have a web developer custom build each site
     from scratch.  This will include out of the box web part (components)
     that are pre-built to fetch content and content categories from the
     Alfresco repository. 

Hope that provides a bit more detail.  In a nutshell:  great for managing the content on your website today, and tomorrow great for managing the process of building and publishing your site.

Here's two more posts that may also be of use:

http://www.alfresco.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=947

http://www.alfresco.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=927


Kevin