Your Feedback on Needs / Use Cases for Alfresco WCM

[kvc]

As you know, Alfresco is working on adding robust, easy-to-use WCM services to the Alfresco platform.  And, as ever, we are keen to make certain we are (a) building the OOTB capabilities you as a development community require and (b) are providing all the necessary hooks you need to extend or customize our solution to fit your needs.

If you have not already taken a look at our wiki, we outline the different components we are focused on, with particular attention to detail around our updated versioning model and the production model (dev –> preview –> staging) associated with it.  For those who have not seen the wiki, you can find it here:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/New_Web_Content_Management_Plan

To open this forum, we would like to open with an open question:  what are YOUR key priorities for WCM?  What services are essential for deploying in your organizations, and specifically what types of websites would you look to be using for?  We would appreciate any feedback on needs, use cases, and examples … we want to ensure that we are building you the right product.  Let's get the discussion rolling, and if you have any specific feedback on what's already on the wiki, fire away!

[dking]

Hi Alfresco,

As I've played with preview 1, one of the things I have thought about many times is the ease of use in editing the XML. I have a wide variety of XML doc types; some are reasonably small and have fields for HTML editing (perhaps xs:anyType fields that can contain nested XHTML), some that have moderately complex structures for individual elements which may repeat many dozens of times. The XForms/TinyMCE editor as I've experienced it gives very limited or no options to collapse an element, or to page through a set of many elements to find the one that needs an edit.

What do you envision changing in the interface? I've tinkered with MyEclipse's XML editor, OxygenXML, and others, and it seems no one has yet come up with a great editing experience (or set of experiences, since different data definitions might warrant different approaches), even leaving off the enabling WYSIWYG XHTML.

Looking forward to beta!

Dennis