Alfresco DevCon Day 0 – Various Notes
I’m surprised at the the number of people who’ve mentioned using Drupal and Alfresco together using CMIS. It seems to be a pretty popular option. Also, I learned that Acquia released customized Drupal, Commons, for community/intranet sites that we might want to explore.
Ran into Peter Monks who wrote a very handy extension that allows you to use Groovy to dynamically test out code. It’s a developer tool only due to security concerns, but should save developers a lot of time. He also talked to me about the cloud APIs and future plans for extending Alfresco with “out-of-process” calls via HTTP. The latter sounded very interesting especially for making development easier.
Also, I have to thank Daryl Quinn (?) from Alfresco for being a good sport. At lunch, Richard and I spoke with a guy from Pearson who had an interesting question about how to use Alfresco to integrate with various existing content repositories. I suggested he ask the guy in the Alfresco shirt sitting near us. That was Daryl and he gave a good answer that I want to file away for future use – create the meta-data in Alfresco via a “content-less” object, storing a reference to the content in the other repository. He said you could even index the object in Lucene/SOLR, but you’d need to write some custom code to pull it in.
Overall, it was a good day.