All articles, tagged with “shameless plug”

Last summer I changed roles at Alfresco and moved from technical sales to technical marketing. It has been a lot of fun to own a technology project again. My main focus since that time has been to replace the Alfresco Developer Forge with a new Add-ons Directory located here:

http://addons.alfresco.com

As of this writing, there are more than 70 add-ons listed!

I posted a few months ago to the Alfresco Forums about our plans to replace Forge. The system hasn’t received proper care and feeding, is increasingly hard to defend against spammers and mal-doers, and there are modern code forges that provide a better developer experience than we are able to deliver as a side-service (I am partial to Bit Bucket or Google Code because I find Mercurial so much easier to use that Git). When we examined what our community really wanted from Forge, the important service was to have a single place to locate an interesting add-on to Alfresco. So we build a site that does just that.

On the site you can submit an add-on hosted anywhere on the Internet. You can browse add-ons, rate add-ons, and leave comments. We still have some back-end work to do so that created accounts are stored in a system that can be leveraged by the forums, wiki, and issue tracker (I apologize for asking for a new username and password), but the system is currently usable. Important features like search, tagging, and usage statistics are also in the works.

For those who are interested, the site is built on Drupal 7 and will in the future be integrated with Alfresco. I have personally found Drupal to be a disappointing platform to work with, but that is a subject for a future blog post (summary: you should use Django). While building the site I learned a lot about HTML5 and CSS3, but I don’t know if it is actually improving search indexing of the site yet.

Forge has been a useful tool over the last five years, but we are encouraging all projects hosted there to move. Forge is closed to new projects and new users, and at the end of February we plan to make that server read-only. It will eventually be turned off completely.

If you have any feedback on Add-ons or concerns with the future of Forge, you should get in contact with me. I would enjoy discussing it with you.

YCombinator’s Hacker News recently linked to an interesting post entitled “What every computer science major should know”.

I think it’s a pretty good list, but like others I have seen, it has a hole around the knowledge domain of Content Management, Content Modeling, and Information Architecture.

There are some core tools that every software engineer needs in their toolbox: a programming language, a scripting language, a database, source control, build management, bug tracking, project management skills, and more. If you aren’t already aware of the tools that exist to solve these common problems, you will end up re-inventing the wheel. All too often, software engineers and systems architects reinvent the wheel around content management.

I recognize that I am biased. When I started working for Alfresco two years ago, I thought content management was used for building web sites. It took me a while to realize that every time I built a file store with a flat-file index, every time I stuck collaborative content in Subversion and then struggled with how to get my teammates to update it, and every time I tried to grep Word Documents, I was dealing with content management. These aren’t web-based problems necessarily, and they certainly aren’t easily solved with a database. Like most engineers, I muddled through. I accepted my poor solutions as “how things are done”, and moved on to more (at the time) interesting problems.

Thank goodness for content management. Someone finds these problems interesting enough to worry about them night and day. These people have built some great solutions that are both easy to deploy and free. While working at Alfresco, I have come to enjoy solving content management problems. I think every engineer’s life will be easier if they are considering a good content management tool at least as often as they consider setting up a database.

I recently changed my role at Alfresco. Instead of being a “Solutions Engineer” (our title for Sales Engineers), I am now more involved with helping our Community interact and grow (I never thought I would be joining a Marketing Department, but here I am). As part of that role, I am helping to build awareness of Alfresco and content management in general.

Since this is my blog, I can shamelessly plug the Alfresco QuickTake video I did about “5 Tools that Alfresco Provides Developers”. When I watch the video, I only see my mistakes in presentation style. But my goal with that video was to describe some of the ways Alfresco can assist developers with generic content management problems, and thereby save people from re-inventing that particular wheel. Hopefully it helps you understand why a good content management tool will help you wax strong in all three virtues of a programmer.

As part of my new role, I also have been able to participate in planning our annual Developer’s Conference. I highly recommend you consider attending. either this year or at some point in the future; you will be surprised how many problems that confront you can be solved with an open source tool like Alfresco.

If you are on the fence, (or even if you aren’t), you should check out this decision matrix. Really—check it out; you will thank me later.

So put this tool in your toolbox. It’s free, it’s effective, and then you can get back to solving new problems.