[OOTB-hive] Some ideas

[Martin Cosgrave]

As a first pass at getting some concrete ideas down, here's a list of a 
few things I've considered and/or discussed with others on this list.


1) a "showcase" instance of Alfresco

For multiple purposes. To store our collaborative efforts as OOTB and to 
act as a content platform to publish the results. I.e. "we eat our own 
dog food", or perhaps in this case, "bee food". ("Eating our own nectar")

We might want two instances, one as a showcase, and one as a testbed, so 
if someone turns up into the IRC channel with a question we could log 
him/her onto the testbed instance and demonstrate certain points of 
configuration etc.

A testbed instance should be rebuilt every night and/or on demand.


2) collaborate on new addons

This has been discussed a bit, Darkstar1 is keen on finishing the AAAR 
work he was collaborating on for the hackathon. Me, not so much, but if 
anyone fancied having a go at a JMX layer for CE or else integrating an 
MQ (Rabbit? ActiveMQ?) as a new extension point, I'd be interested in 
collaborating on either of those.

More ideas here please, if that's what we decide to focus on


3) a curated set of FOSS addons

The addons site is a bit of a mess. Some addons are obsolete, some have 
made it into core but are still listed (e.g. node browser), many are 
proprietary and none of them are categorised AFAICS

I propose here that we review whatever addons might be useful and can be 
considered 'community' (personally I would exclude paid proprietary 
addons here) and, using alfresco as a content platform, create the OOTB 
curated addons collection. ("Honeycomb"? "Apiary"?)

Of course we would need to think about the WCM front end. WCMQS is 
pretty poor, something like drupal would appear to be too heavyweight 
(and it's PHP, spit). Personally I really like the approach taken by ACA 
IT for their 'heroic journey', which was to build a lightweight frontend 
in Angular JS. [1]. There are other modern templating systems such as 
Mustache and Handlebars which could be suitable.


4) Alfresco "OOTB edition"

A bit ambitious, this would be kind of a combination of some of the 
ideas, involving creating build scripts (perhaps based on Loftux' 
install script) to build our own community edition, perhaps this would 
be what the showcase instance was built from. It's ambitious because it 
would need a lot of testing and would probably need to be rebuilt and 
tested with every 'letter' release of CE (e.g. 4.2.g)

I'm not suggesting that it's a great idea, but it came up in a 
conversation with Darkstar1, so I'm throwing it out there in case anyone 
thinks it's great. It does have a kind of branding advantage for the 
OOTB group but if it detracts from the current community offering it 
might be disadvantageous.




I'm interested in all your thoughts on these, in a brainstorm kind of 
way, negative and positive. We can see what falls out of it and maybe 
progress on to some proposals after that. More ideas are of course welcomed!


marsbard



[1] 
http://summit.alfresco.com/barcelona/sessions/heroic-journey-alfresco-and-angularjs