Making changes to Alfresco

[chakros]

Our group needed a content management system and research yielded that Alfresco is probably the way to go. I downloaded the community version of alfresco version 2.0 setup. The setup went fine. We were able to upload some of our documents and setup one of the out of box workflows.
Now our group wants to implement a more complicated workflow and make changes to the space interface (like additional fields, dropdowns, etc..etc) to accomodate some of our requirements.
What should be the starting point to do that? Any help will be appreciated.

[flin]

Hi,

The wiki is always a good starting point http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Main_Page


There you will find how to customize the Web Client and other aspects.

Good Luck!

[chakros]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for the response. I went through the WIKI. There is a lot of material for me to sift through. I actually went over the part where it talks about customization of the UI:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Client_Customisation_Guide

But doesn't really explains how to add new components to the UI and wire up its properties so that it persists though the entire application.

Some sample to do that will be of immense help.

Thanks

[flin]

Did you get Alfresco SDK yet? I'm not on my office so I can't really point you exactly where (I think) you can find this sample, but I'm pretty sure Alfresco SDK has it.

If you want to customize data models and add your own properties, all you need to do is to create your model metadata, then set the values at your customized code and node.save. It will persist across everything

[chakros]

I downloaded the Alfresco SDK and have managed to set it up with the eclipse IDE. Now I have all these SDKs like:
-AlfrescoEmbedded
-FirstFoundationClient
etc.
Now what I am confused about is how the architecture is setup. How do these SDKs merge with my preinstalled alfresco that I am running on my machine?
How do I make sure my changes are incorporated to alfresco via eclipse. The SDKs are not files and the documentation mentions I am not re-building Alfresco, so how does my changes get incorporated.

I really appreciate the help I am getting here.

[chakros]

So I have exported SDK FirstFoundationClient as a JAR file to

C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\lib

I have added FirstFoundationClient.jar to alfresco.war.

Now when I start the alfresco server, run the webclient and navigate to company home, nothing happens.

Can somebody point out what is going wrong here?

[gavinc]

Hi,

You typically use the SDK to build modules/extensions for Alfresco. Once you have an artifact from this i.e. a JAR file you copy it to the relevant place in your running Alfresco, look at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Adding_a_Custom_Dialog as an example.

If you are just making configuration changes these can be done directly in your running Alfresco environment. For details on creating your own model and configuring the UI to show these properties have a look at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Displaying_Custom_Metadata

If you want to make changes to the Alfresco code itself then you'll need to get the code from SVN, you'll then be able to use our build scripts to rebuild the whole project, see http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_SVN_Development_Environment for details.