prototyping content types similar to Drupal CCK

[tolland]

Hi all,

this is my first post so hi everybody!

I have a number of projects that use drupal CCK and drupal custom content types to store documents relating to various real world items such as real estate properties, schools, school projects and the like.

I am interested to move those repositories to a more standardised, Java based platform and JCR looks very interesting, as do some of the other features provided by alfresco.

However I am having trouble getting to understand how I should be approaching using alfresco for this, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for what I should be looking into with regard to the following;

what tools are available to directly edit the content type nodes in the repository, other than directly editing xml files. ie is there a desktop client I can use to create node types?

really it looks like surf is going to be the way forward, but I am struggling to understand how to start? is it possible to edit nodes and node types from the surf application? is there a demo of this?

Thanks,

Tom

[nancyg]

Hello Tom,

Welcome to the Alfresco community. You may not be aware of this but there is actually an integration between Drupal and Alfresco, you can find it on drupal.org, just search for Alfresco. It uses CMIS, which is an API that provides a standard way to access content, you can read more about that here, http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS. Some members of our community have used Drupal as the web presentation tier and Alfresco for the enterprise-scalable content services layer.

To get a handle on content modeling, I would suggest that you take a look at Jeff Pott's tutorials, http://ecmarchitect.com/categories/content-management/alfresco-developer-series. He has several that will help you get started but the one on content modeling is here http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2007/06/09/756. He presents a good overview along with some samples.

Nancy