Customization of Alfresco Share

[pspotdar]

Hi All,

Recently I have installed community edition of Alfresco v4.0.d on Linux environment.
I already have fully implemented phpBB3 and Wordpress blog along with numerous posts and topics populated (we are using this two products for nearly 3 years).

I want to use these software as it is and link with Alfresco Share instead of in-built forum and blogs. Also, Alfresco search functionality should index the content from these external application.

Although for blog, I already integrated Wordpress with Alfresco for private and external posting.

Braodly speaking the menu-bar and search capability presented in Alfresco Community home page is exactly my requirement.
I am going to use the Alfresco for document management hence rest of the default facility suffice my need.

Currently I am exploring http://quercus.caucho.com/ to integrate the phpBB as mentioned in one of the old post.

Can anyone help me here to customise Alfresco Share to substitute forum and blog with my external one and suggest how to configue Alfresco search to handle these external application (sites)

Thanks in advance
Prashant

[resplin]

Architecturally, there are three approaches to integrating anything with Alfresco:

1. Have Alfresco be the canonical source and publish to the other application (duplicating the content),
2. Have Alfresco be the canonical source and have the other application pull from Alfresco (could be real-time),
3. Maintain the content in the other application, and archive it (duplicate it) in Alfresco.

Alfresco isn't designed to pull content from an external source for searching or inclusion in the interface.

The WordPress integration in Share is type 1. Because the publishing mechanism is already implemented, it is easy to setup. There is a CMIS plugin for WordPress which allows it to consume Alfresco content (type 2). Getting your old WordPress content into Share for archival purposes wouldn't be much development effort (type 3). You would export from WordPress and write a script to upload it into Alfresco (it could even link back to the live blog). Synchronising evolving content would be a challenge however.

phpBB is more complex because the content is going to evolve. It wouldn't be too hard to remove the existing discussion forum in Share and create a custom page which embeds your phpBB forum. But to have the content show up in Alfresco's search the content would have to be ingested at some point using one of the above strategies. Archiving old discussions wouldn't be very bad, but I don't know how to push content from Alfresco's discussions into phpBB or export content from phpBB for consumption by Alfresco, short of pulling it directly out of the database.

I am sorry for not being able to provide detailed information, but hopefully these thoughts help you consider your options.

[rdanner]

Hi All,

Recently I have installed community edition of Alfresco v4.0.d on Linux environment.
I already have fully implemented phpBB3 and Wordpress blog along with numerous posts and topics populated (we are using this two products for nearly 3 years).

I want to use these software as it is and link with Alfresco Share instead of in-built forum and blogs. Also, Alfresco search functionality should index the content from these external application.

Although for blog, I already integrated Wordpress with Alfresco for private and external posting.

Braodly speaking the menu-bar and search capability presented in Alfresco Community home page is exactly my requirement.
I am going to use the Alfresco for document management hence rest of the default facility suffice my need.

Currently I am exploring http://quercus.caucho.com/ to integrate the phpBB as mentioned in one of the old post.

Can anyone help me here to customise Alfresco Share to substitute forum and blog with my external one and suggest how to configue Alfresco search to handle these external application (sites)

Thanks in advance
Prashant

To echo what I'm hearing:
* You want to use an Alfresco share project
* But you want your existing blogs and forums in that experience rather than the Alfresco Share native ones

What I didn't here:
* That you must have the forums and blog content back in Alfresco

I'll provide a basic blueprint for one option to achieve these goals:
The basic idea behind this blue print would to be to go for something loosely coupled so that you have less to worry about in upgrades.  I would call this the "NON IFRAME, visual integration option with optional data flow back to Alfresco for system of record / search."

The easy part:
* You would create pages, and webscript components to house these, also you would update the presets.xml to include your changes.

The hard part is the integration. 
- Use a proxy to allow clicks to go back to the origin blog server or forum
- Use a javascript based library to rewrite links and capture events and negotiate / forward them via the proxy
- This gets you "visual integration"

If you also want your blog/forum content in Alfresco:
- If the blog and the forum have RSS based feeds you can use an Idempotent reader on the RSS feed to pull or push this content in to Alfresco.  Put this reader in Alfresco or in a integration tool like Mule.