Christopher Warner

So here are some reactions on twitter from myself. Originally when I posted about twitter I had no idea about it really so I threw it out there in this post titled, “What is the purpose of twitter” in hopes that someone, anyone would explain it to me. Also, giving myself a 2 week in period in which I would utilize the service etc etc. Turns out, twitter is great! At least, it’s great if you are talking about a specific topic. From my first “tweet” (this sounds dumb to me), I got a lot of information back on the topics I was speaking about. From feedback, some people actually read my blog or were already following me and others were added from my email to twitter and already had twitter accounts so immediately started following my “tweets” etc. This turned into a great thing. When I tweeted about content management; everyone hit me on IM, sent me email or tweeted back. When I spoke about my car, people who had the same car tweeted back. As an experience i’d have to say it’s been a positive one. At first I had Twitterific (the application that I use) sending me updated tweets every 15 minutes. As I added more people that became simply too much to deal with so I had to cut it down to an hour and even that became a little difficult to manage. Eventually I found a good balance for myself and things worked out. Now, for my self, I don’t tweet often or as often as others because I don’t have the time. Usually I only tweet when I’m about to begin work on something and have a question, or a statement based on something I have already done. Personal things I tend not to tweet; so for instance there is no “I’m drinking coffee right now” sort of thing. Anyway, as stated Twitter has been a positive experience for me all around so I will most likely continue to use it when i’m about to do something of interest and would like to hear feedback. (If you are interested in content management, iphone development or cars feel free to follow me @christophwarner)

That aside, I am writing a book! The outline is almost done (if you’ve ever wanted to hear more from me on opensource content management systems you have till Monday 05/18/2009 to say something) so now is a good time to get some of the topics you want covered in;  The book is going to be for beginners that are looking to immerse themselves into the next level of content management and intranets. I’m finding that the idea of writing a book seems like the easiest thing in the world. Actually writing a book is probably one of the most difficult things I have done. Even more so than any program, the linux kernel, embedded programming or anything of that nature. The delicate balance between writing on a topic and giving it good coverage and explaining it to the layman is simply an art that shouldn’t be written off so lightly. Sure, many people have written books but writing a GOOD one is the point and i’m only on the outline! So I still have 250 pages to go!! =( trying to stay motivated.

It’s going to be a busy, busy summer, if i’m not updating as much or I miss a month or two I’d like to apologize in advance; but at least you’ll have something to look forward to towards the end of the year!

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.