WCM - still haven't got my head around this yet.
Seems to me that Alfresco facilitates generation of static content and that
you have to write your own components in whatever language you prefer
for dynamic behaviour. This appears to be the opposite of MOSS where
you build a dynamic website using site content/components (i.e. MOSS
WCM sites sit on top of the repository).
WCM lets you develop and virtualize both static and dynamic websites…
and a whole lot more.
To the best of my knowledge, Alfresco has the only product on the
market (open or closed source) that lets you virtualize a collaborative
development environment for webapps, JSPs, and static content.
This is made possible by the AVM (our new versioning content repository)
and the tomcat-based virtualization server. For more information about
what this virtualization is and how it works, see:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Virtualization_Server_FAQ
Imagine this: suppose you've got a bunch of users each has their own
"virtual view" of the website that does not show the changes they've
made until they've submitted them & those submissions have been
approved via a workflow. WCM sandboxes allow content contributors
and reviewers to see all proposed changes in-context just as if every
user had full read/write access to the central copy in the "staging" area.
For more information about collaborative content production see:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Collaborative_Content_Production
WCM also supports auto-generated web forms that let you
collect information from content contributors, store that
data in a structured way (within XML records), create
custom indexes for metadata-based queries, and render
the XML data you collected via XSLT or freemarker templates
as HTML files, pdf, or whatever else you'd like.
This means that all your content contributors don't have to
be HTML wizards, they can just fill out auto-generated forms.
The look and feel of your website can thus be controlled
in a fully skinnable way by the much smaller subset of
developers at your site that *are* html/jsp/servlet wizards…
and they get to enjoy all the same flexibility they'd get in
a non-virtualized environment.
Every user's virtual webapp has a 1:1 correspondence
with a virtual host, so unlike cookie-based virtualization,
you can see multiple virtual views of the website at the same time
(which is great for reviewers & authors comparing their changeset
to staging), set bookmarks to virtual views in your browser just as you
would with a non-virtualized site, send links to virtualized assets via
email, etc.
In version 2.1, WCM also has built-in link validation.
This lets users and reviewers determine what a proposed
set of changes would break in staging, and allows the status
of all links in staging to be scanned in a scalable way
(this includes both internal and external http & https links).
WCM also supports SVN-like time travel in that version "snapshots"
are taken of entire directory systems, rather than single assets.
Unlike simple single-item versioning, this means you can look at
everything as it was at a particular moment, not just a file-at-a-time.
For those familiar with CVS, it's as if you always had a unique tag
for every checkin.
There are a lot of very powerful features here, and one point that
dozyarmadillo made I'd whole-heartedly agree with is that our docs
need more structure, examples, and coverage. This will come.
Our enterprise customers enjoy fuller access to support and training,
which makes their lives easier… but we want *everybody* to succeed,
and that means more docs, examples, out-of-the-box solutions,
and polish. We're growing very fast, and see this as essential to
scaling up even more.
As an engineer that quit a closed-source company to work at Alfresco,
I'm also personally committed to seeing enterprise-level features
made available to everybody. In the words of A.J. Liebling
"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
This is the age of information, so enabling grass-roots collaboration
and publishing is the best way I can think of so far to help fulfill
the Internet's potential for enabling people to share their thoughts,
and leverage each other's skills.
Your comments and suggestions are most helpful.
Please keep them coming!
Cheers,
-Jon
