[OOTB-hive] Addons for the distro

[Martin Cosgrave]

Hi All

As you know we are trying to do two things around the addons space for 
Alfresco

One is to select a list of addons which we will curate as "bee-approved" 
addons.

The second, which I want to discuss now, is the much smaller list of 
addons which we will try to build into our distribution of Alfresco.

We have had some discussions about this already but it is something that 
everyone involved in the Order might have a useful opinion on, so I'd 
like to ask everyone now to come up with ideas about what we should 
include in the bee build.

I think that the javascript console has been almost universally 
mentioned whenever this is discussed. Another suggestion was the "unzip" 
action.

Personally I would like to see the model designer addon: 
http://addons.alfresco.com/addons/becpg-model-designer-alfresco - 
actually I have not been able to get this to work myself but I spoke to 
one of the developers at Summit and he is keen to get the addon in front 
of more community members, so we can probably get him to work directly 
on it to make it work with our distro. If it works well for building 
models within share, then I think it would be a great addon for the bee 
distro.

This looks like an interesting new addon too: 
http://addons.alfresco.com/addons/alfresco-inboxes - it looks like it 
might be something like a "poor man's record management" or like the 
"active folders" concept that John Newton spoke about at Summit.

So what ideas do you all have? It would be great if we could be guided 
by the concept of making a more easy to use/customise/configure product, 
i.e. more runtime/gui config along with less backend customisation. If 
our target market is those organisations who could use Alfresco but 
could not afford to buy Enterprise, then we should recognise that those 
organisations also cannot afford much in the way of development resource 
to customise the product.

Thanking you in advance for your suggestions.


Martin