Confused! What purpose does Alfresco serve?

[madhatter]

I am looking for a java based content management system, to be used in a website context.. Alfresco showed up in my search for one… but I am unsure if Alfresco fits this role.

I downloaded, installed, and got running Alfresco. As far as I can see, I upload files to Alfresco, and Alfresco stores them into a database, using MySQL?

But how does this help me manage my website files? i.e. http://localhost/helloworld/index.html

Doing it the manual way, I would modify the index.html file located in my tomcat_installation_dir/webapps/helloworld directory.

Perhaps this is not Alfresco's purpose (managing website content,) if so what would one use Alfresco for?

[gavinc]

Yes, currently Alfresco is focused on document management.

Our web content management features will be coming sometime later this year.

[paulhh]

Alfresco, at its core, is a general purpose content repository with content management services.  There is an application surface, the web client, , which at the moment is very document-centric.  However, this will be changing this year, with WCM features arriving from about June onwards.  There are features already there that people are using for managing content that is served to websites (e.g. transformations, content templates), but capabilities like site management are not there today.

Watch out for announcements next month about our WCM 🙂

Cheers
Paul.