Alfresco is the renowned and multiple award-winning open source Enterprise content management system which allows you to build, design, and implement your very own ECM solutions.
You have read a number of tutorials, blogs, and books on Alfresco. Now you're in the real world, trying to use Alfresco, but you're running into problems with it. This is the book you want, packed full of solutions that can be instantly applied to this cookbook with its practical-based recipes and minimal explanation meets that demand.
This Alfresco 3 Cookbook boasts a comprehensive selection of recipes covering everything from the basics to the advanced. The book has recipes for quickly installing Alfresco in Windows and Linux and helping you use custom content model, rules, and search. There is also a collection of recipes focused on creating Scripts, Freemarker templates, Web Scripts, and new workflow definitions. Steps to integrate Alfresco with other systems like MS-Office are also included. You will be able to use Alfresco's File and e-mail servers. Finally, step-by-step recipes are presented to create an Alfresco build environment and compile the source code. This Alfresco 3 Cookbook is perfect for developers looking to start working on Alfresco quickly, gain complete understanding, write custom implementations, and achieve expertise very easily.
Chapter 1, Getting Started: It introduces Alfresco with brief demonstration of the Alfresco Explorer application. Get Alfresco downloaded and installed on your machine, and finally be acquainted with the default distribution and architecture of Alfresco.
Chapter 2, Creating and Organizing Contents: It explains how to use Alfresco as Content Management System, how to upload or create contents, how to apply tagging or categorization of content, understand content metadata, use the document versioning capability of Alfresco.
Chapter 3, Securing and Searching Contents: It is about another important aspect of the Content Management System—Security. It helps you understand how to secure your contents and folders. How to create users and user groups—and assign permissions for who can do what. You will also know about the search capabilities offered by Alfresco, how to search contents and how search works in Alfresco.
Chapter 4, Rules—the Smart Spaces: It will help you learn how to make your Alfresco repository dynamic, how to implement your business requirements that works automatically in the repository. You will understand how to create and apply rules in the repository; you will also be familiar with different actions that can be performed via a rule.
Chapter 5, Administering Alfresco: It contains recipes for administering Alfresco, demonstrating how to manage users, user groups, create taxonomies, manage content categories. You will also be aware of how to use the Alfresco Node Browser to view and search contents stored in the repository. You will also know how to manage your Alfresco explorer dashboard.
Chapter 6, Customizing Alfresco Web Client: Alfresco offers customization of the Web Client application via a number of XML configuration files. This chapter elaborates various recipes for changing the view and appearance of the web client, customizing the application as per your requirements, and so on.
Chapter 7, Alfresco Content Model: Designing and modeling the content properties and architecture is one of the most important requirements in a content management system. Alfresco offers dynamic capabilities for designing the content models. Using these recipes you will be able to understand the core architecture of Alfresco content models, create your own custom content models, use your custom models in the Alfresco explorer application.
Chapter 8, Alfresco JavaScript API: Alfresco offers the repository functionalities in form of JavaScript APIs. In this chapter, you will understand the API structure and features offered. Several example recipes help you implement various functionalities. You will also learn how to write, execute, and debug scripts written using the APIs.
Chapter 9, Freemarker Templates: Freemarker Template is the presentation layer technology used in Alfresco applications. The recipes of this chapter would help you understand the technologies and model behind the Freemarker templates in Alfresco. Several template examples are included for commonly-used functions such as displaying folder contents, showing workflow tasks, showing contents recursively, displaying content properties and details, and so on.
Chapter 10, Web Scripts : Alfresco Web Scripts provide RESTful APIs of the repository services and functions. The chapter elaborates all related concepts, knowledge and how-to do it recipes that would help you write, deploy and debug web scripts. You will also understand the usage of default web scripts library that come with Alfresco. Several sample web scripts are included, for example sending e-mails using templates, searching and displaying documents, and so on.
Chapter 11, Working with Workflows: Workflow implementation is one of the major requirements in a content management system in a business. This chapter would help you understand the Alfresco business process engine in detail. You will understand how the workflows are implemented in Alfresco repository along with various components of the workflow engine. Several detailed examples and recipes are included to guide you create custom workflows, custom task models, specific resource bundles, customizing the web client to render the custom tasks and workflows properly. You will also be able to use the Alfresco workflow console interface which is useful for debugging the task execution within the BPM engine.
Chapter 12, Integrating with MS Outlook and MS Office : Alfresco can be used from several other applications and interfaces. Being a content management system, it is quite important to have the Alfresco repository accessibility from some popular content authoring applications such as Microsoft Office. This chapter helps you integrate the Alfresco repository with MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Recipes are also included for communicating with repository directly from any standard e-mail client application such as MS Outlook.
Chapter 13, Configuring Alfresco E-mail and File Servers: The Alfresco repository can act has file servers as well and you can expose the repository using several other standard protocols such as FTP, CIFS, WebDAV, and so on. These recipes are a step-by-step guide to configure these protocols and using the content repository from different systems. From this chapter, you will also be able to use Alfresco as e-mail server, and e-mails sent to some specific address will land directly into the repository.
Chapter 14, Building Alfresco: Until now you have used Alfresco as the binary bundle provided and downloaded. Now you can compile and build Alfresco source code also. Recipes in this chapter will guide you to get the source from Alfresco source code repository, compile and build the source code. You can modify Alfresco source code as your will; of course as per Alfresco license, you should contribute your changes back to Alfresco community.
The software list for this book is as follows:
Tomcat server
MySQL server, MySQL Workbench, MYSQL GUI Tools, SQLYog
JDK
WinZIP or WinRAR
OpenOffice
MS Office, MS Outlook
ImageMagick
PDF2SWF
Subversion Client—TortoiseSVN
Apache Ant
Alfresco software
If you are a software developer interested in content management systems, who wants to work with Alfresco or is already experienced in Alfresco, this cookbook will get you up and running quickly. If you want rapid implementation of Alfresco's most important and effective features then this is the cookbook for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We choose our InfoAxon folder for this operation."
A block of code is set as follows:
<imports> <!-- Import Alfresco Dictionary Definitions --> <import uri="http://www.alfresco.org/model/dictionary/1.0" prefix="d"/> <!-- Import Alfresco Content Domain Model Definitions --> <import uri="http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0" prefix="cm"/> </imports>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<content-types>
<type name="iabook:Product"/>
</content-types>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Go to Company Home and try to add a new Content.".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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