Christopher Warner "So, it's not like the code is my brain; keep it"

Alfresco review part two

So after talking with Luis Sala yesterday from Alfresco he cleared some of the misconceptions I had about Alfresco and there were some interesting highlights.

1. Alfresco doesn’t necessarily have to be responsible for templating so essentially it can publish static/dynamic contact and you can include that into the overall design of your page. Personally and from experience this leads to problems depending on your web server platform. IE: Apache uses includes and because there is no management system for that; it can get ugly.
2. Dreamweaver can be used for management of items in Alfresco.
3. Content types are created via XML schema and can actually have sub-schemas. So you can embed a content-type in a content-type or as part of creating a complex-content type. Turning this into a mapped object is handled by Hibernate.
4. Alfresco has it’s own caching system but as with anything you’d have to have your own caching platform for any serious operation. Squid/Varnish + Memcache/Akamai whatever.
5. For enterprise solutions he recommended a contract with lets say Mysql or Jboss. In an enterprise situation one probably already has a contract for Mysql if that’s what you are using for your database setup in production. For Jboss, that’s an added cost but that’s if you use Jboss.
6. Alfresco does relationships except it’s not exposed via the user interface. So one would have to manually setup relationships between content-types. This isn’t such a big deal so long as the relationship stuff works decently.
7. It also has something called renditions that will statically publish the piece of content in a specific rendition or file format. So for instance if you want a list of models based on your model content type you can get back xml, html, json and have that published statically. So you can have different ‘renditions’ of content; mobile, print-only version, teasers etc.
8. Auto indexing of content immediately via Lucene.
9. One major thing for me is the lack of events on objects or specific objects. You can work around this via workflow but it would be really nice to see Alfresco and other content management systems employ proper event systems.
10. Alfresco isn’t just document management even though that’s how it’s primarily used and started.  There are other core pieces that make the above possible specifically WCM; so one technically could have the best of both worlds.

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